Does the body allocate a lot of resources to heal muscle strain such that you feel fatigue?

Question

I was training in Judo and I injured my muscle on the left buttock pretty bad (a pretty bad muscle strain / pulled muscle).

It feels painful in the buttock when I walk or doing certain movements that involves that muscle.

I also noticed that in the first 3 days after the injury, I kept feeling fatigue / tired.

It is almost like when you have a cold, the body needs to fight the bacteria or virus, which consumes a lot of energy, and you feel fatigue.

Is it a similar situation in the case with muscle strain? Does the body consume a lot of nutrients and energy to heal the muscle, so much that I feel tired, fatigue, sleepy, difficult to concentrate at work, etc?

Answer 1

Every injury is work for your body.

I recently heard a podcast with a physiotherapist and nutritionist who said that postoperative (like properly invasive procedures) you typically need about 1.5 times the amount of calories in rest than normally. With significant parts of your skin burnt, the healing efforts over an immense amount of tissue can mean you need up to 500% of your normal caloric intake in rest.

Therefore, if you damaged your muscle tissue, this definitely means a lot of work for your body. You need more calories to deal with the damage, the inflammatory reaction coming with it, and the rebuilding plus maybe reinforcement (in the case of muscles tissue, hypertrophy) in your tissue.

As I am a Judo player myself, I know that it can be basically your whole body that hurts. And feeling tired, needing more food and rest than usual is nothing unusual. Remember, damaged tissue always means inflammatory reactions, just like an infection does.