Soreness, and a bit of oomph when extending/straightening your arms after a workout is normal and happens to all of us.

Being unable to fully extend/straighten your arms, or to do so with a lot of difficulty is not normal, and hopefully for your sake does not occur often.

Fortunately, this is a common problem, and there are many ways to rapidly decrease the soreness you feel so that you can get back to extending and straightening your arm as normal.

Why Can’t I Straighten / Extend Arms After Workout?

When we tend to train harder then e have in the past, or when we train after having not trained for a while, we tend to be sore. We experience normal levels of soreness which is to be expected.

But when we push ourselves drastically further than before, we tend to become drastically more sore.

As a result, you are feeling severe muscle soreness and an inability to extend/straighten your arms.

This is likely no cause for concern though.

Just last year after pausing my workouts for the month of Ramadan, I to got back in the gym and annihilated my arms.

The next day I could not extend my arms.

I to inflicted way more stress on my biceps than my biceps could handle and as a result exceeded normal soreness levels, and experienced Level 10 soreness that did not allow me to extend my arms.

But using the following strategies I rapidly rid myself of the muscle soreness and muscle tightness. And Got back to normally extending and straightening my arms.

Should I Be Worried I Can’t Extend Arms After A workout?

This is not medical advice – if you are worried about what is occurring in your body consult with a licensed medical professional – if it is a medical emergency contact 911 or your local emergency service

You will probably be able to be able to straighten your arms, within 24/72 hours, and as such there is not much to be worried about.

If symptoms persist, worsen, etc consult with a licensed medical professional

Straighten your arms: How long it took me

It took me somewhere around 24-48 hours to be able to straighten and extend my arms.

Of course, the time duration will vary from person to person based on sleep, additional recovery methods utilized, genetics, the extent of the soreness, and so on.

Regardless the strategies below will help you rapidly advance the timeframe so may straighten your arms ASAP.

Strategies To Quickly Be Able To Straighten Your Arm

The strategies below will help you

1. minimize muscle soreness
2. Speed up muscle recovery
3. Increase blood flow/promote blood flow to your arms
4. release muscle tightness
5. reduce muscle stiffness
6. And much more

Enabling you to get back to straightening your arms ASAP!

Strategy 1 – Foam Rolling

Steps To Foam Roll

1. Using a foam roller gently foam roll your arms
   • Placing the foam roller on a surface like a bed, and kneeling next to the bed can be helpful
2. Roll the
   • Biceps
   • Triceps
   • Forearms
3. Roll each for 15-30 seconds
4. repeat 1-2 times

Check out this helpful video tutorial for a guided demo

Strategy 2 – Massage Gun

1. Select the foam/plastic ball attachment and apply it to the massage gun
2. Starting with a low speed begin massaging your arm in the following order
   • Bicep
   • back of the arm (tricep)
   • the outer side of the arm (bicep/tricep)
   • inner arm area (bicep/tricep)
   • Inner forearm
   • Outer forearm
3. Massage each area for 30-60 seconds
4. Gently increase the speed as needed

Strategy 3 – Cold/Ice Bath (authors favourite)

1. Fill a bathtub with the coldest water possible
   • Optional: add ice to set the desired water temperature
     • I never use ice and just use the coldest water the bathtub gives and find the results powerful
2. Submerge your upper body in the water (including arms) for 3-6 mins

Strategy 4 – Hot Epsom Salt Bath

1. Fill the bathtub with water hot enough that you feel a little zazz when you enter the water
   • Apply common sense – please dont burn yourself
2. Add 2 cups of Epsom salt into the bath tub
3. Soak in the tub for 20 mins
4. Rehydrate after exiting the tub

Strategy 5 – Massage/other professional help

If professional help like

• Getting a massage
• Getting myofascial work
• Getting cupping therapy
• Etc

Is available to you, I highly recommend giving it a shot to supercharge your arms recovery so you can get back to straightening your arms ASAP

Your next arm workout

This 3 step formula helped me ease back into my biceps workout WITHOUT overtraining them so I wouldn’t again be stuck unable to straighten my arm

Use this formula specifically during your biceps workout

1. Ease into it
   • Warm up adequately
   • Perform simple biceps exercises that don’t stretch the bicep (e.g no preacher curls)
2. Take it light
   • Avoid heavy weight
   • hitting prs
   • training all out to failure
3. Quit while you are ahead
   • End your biceps workout when your biceps still have some juice left in the tank

Tips for eradicating Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

Every strategy listed above is also very effective for eliminating regular delayed onset muscle soreness.

My go to methods to reduce Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness Are:

1. Hot Epsom Slath Baths
2. Cold Baths
3. Deep Stretching
4. Massage
5. Foam Rolling
6. + A few others I’ll throw in here and there