Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness: A Prediction Error Brief Review
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Keywords
eccentric exercise, predictive processing, evolutionary biology
Abstract
Delayed-onset muscle soreness is a common and well-researched phenomenon among exercising populations, whose symptoms can impair movement quality and subsequent participation in activities. Traditional explanations have focused mostly on tissue and cellular damage and the body’s inflammatory responses. This has led to many hypotheses that often do not fully agree with one another or adequately capture the complexity of the matter. Principles of evolutionary biology have previously been applied to phenomena in exercise science and seem well-suited to interpreting this issue. This brief review introduces a unifying theoretical framework that shifts the perspective from mainly tissue- and cellular-level explanations to centrally mediated predictive processes, incorporating principles from evolutionary biology and predictive processing theory.
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