Originally Posted by Roody
Three ideas that I know of, to decrease training-related pain:
- Good fit on your bicycle.
- Gradual increase of intensity and volume of training.
- Post-training nutrition--eat a little snack with carbs and protein after a hard ride.
+1 on nutrition.
Even if you think you're getting enough, you may not be. For a couple days my legs had been a bit sore. After a little while of not getting better, I wondered what was up. One morning, I woke up and it finally hit me...I was undernourished. I think I ate around 800-1000 calories that morning and was still hungry.
The moral of the story is listen to your body. If you're hurting, you need to find the root cause, rather than mask the symptoms with pain killers. You should really only rely on pain meds very infrequently, for the reasons other people have mentioned.