How to Treat Body Aches

Methods of treating body aches are similar, whether they are caused by muscle strain, arthritis, illness, or a chronic disease like fibromyalgia. For short-term body aches, your body just needs time to heal or recover from an illness. For chronic pain, the key is learning to manage the pain, or find things you can do to alleviate it, even for short periods of time.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Allow yourself time to rest. Forcing yourself to continue to live as if you aren't in pain is usually going to make things worse. If the body aches are due to strenuous exercise, either do a very light workout until your muscles feel better, or do some other kind of exercise that won't further stress those muscles until they heal.
2. Take an over the counter pain reliever. This will not only help with the body aches themselves, but will aid in reducing the inflammation that might be contributing to the pain.
3. Massage can help the muscles to relax and temporarily relieve body aches. Taking a warm bath, or using a heating pad on the area most affected by the aches can also have the same effect.
4. Manage chronic pain due to arthritis or fibromyalgia by learning what types of exercise you can reasonably do on most days. Exercise can help to relieve symptoms of these diseases, but you need to be aware of days when doing the exercises might cause more harm than good. Getting enough sleep and managing stress can also help chronic pain sufferers.
5. Prevent some body aches due to exercise by properly warming up before you begin your workout, and stretching after you've completed your workout. Remember that some muscle soreness the day after a workout is a good sign that you're challenging your body, and thereby getting stronger.