I mentioned the other week that I had some interesting side effects from the cycle touring holiday. In particular my legs really suffered. I thought I’d set out here what happened and what I believe caused it. You can let me know if you agree with me.
Exercise on the holiday
The holiday involved a significant amount of cycling each day. The truth is that we were actually only moving the pedals for 4-6 hours over the course of 8 or 9 hours each day – this was no Tour de France – but with a bike that is heavier than my usual racing bike and additionally weighed down with touring gear this was a significant effort output for my legs.
Cycle touring - no Tour de France but still requiring muscle adaptations
By the end of the fourth day I was beginning to get a sore knee caused by knots that were starting to form in my right quad muscles. I made a concerted effort to massage the knots by hand overnight which reduced the soreness for the fifth and final day. A follow up rolling effort once we’d returned to the car (where we’d stowed a foam roller) and made it to our hotel for the night made a real difference to the knots and by the next morning a brief rolling session showed that the knots were mostly cleared.
The subsequent problems
After returning home I spent the whole afternoon standing up doing the washing, ironing and tidying up. We’re doing a bit of a rearrangement of the house so I spent several hours standing in front of a bookcase reorganising books – I’m a bit obsessive about having books organised into alphabetical order. As the afternoon wore on my legs started to stiffen up. I thought it was the knots coming back but a rolling session didn’t reveal any knots.
A special treat post-holiday pizza and cheesecake evening (yes, I know – distinctly not paleo) followed and I went to bed stuffed full, satisfied but a little sore.
The next morning I woke up and I can only describe the way my legs felt as “puffy”. It was similar to the sensation that you get when you suffer from a severe insect bite or sprain where the swelling is so extreme that it starts to be constrained by the skin. It’s incredibly uncomfortable. I was still able to walk but the legs of my shorts were tight on my thighs and kneeling down or standing still for too long created additional discomfort.
Call me excessive but it almost felt like my skin was going to split to release the pressure at any moment.
What I think happened
I hadn’t done much cycling before the tour, having only managed to fit in one or two rides of two hours each in the weekends leading up to the holiday. The sudden increase of cycling effort was therefore a shock to my quads. They may have been strong from the squatting I’ve been doing, but squatting and cycling are very different activities.
To handle the cycling it is likely that my muscles rapidly developed additional capillaries to enable my body to supply my muscles with blood to help wash toxins away from them and to provide the muscles with plenty of oxygen.
By spending the afternoon after we got home standing up rather than moving about the blood will have filled up all the capillaries, thanks to gravity, and the additional blood would have swollen up the capillaries. The intake of significant amounts of carbs that evening would then have contributed to the swelling in my legs by replenishing glycogen stores in my muscles. So my legs really were swollen. The combination of additional blood and filled glycogen stores will have made my legs larger than ever before and my skin wasn’t prepared for the increased girth.
That’s my theory and if it’s right then it’s a real warning about the possible side effects of significant changes to exercise patterns and subsequent rapid changes to muscle composition. Do you think I’ve hit on the right reason for the puffy sensation in my legs?
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