This is not necessarily a fitness question persay, but i figured this would be the community to ask. About 3 months ago i started a new job, a factory job, where i'm constantly pushing and lifting tonnes of weight daily. i've gotten used to it, i don't feel nearly as sore as i did when i started, the only thing is how i feel when i wake up.
you see, when i first wake up the first thing i notice is how stiff i am, literally it feels as though each of my individual muscles has turned into cold rubber. And the cracks! every time i move now something or another pops or cracks in any given part of my body. Suffice to say none of this is painful, just... uncomfortable. It's not like they gave me a "how to adapt your body to suddenly doing manual labor 101" pamphlet when i joined, so what exactly should i be doing different? Or is this just a normal phenomenom that i'm not used to?
not sure if this anecdote is relevant to your situation, but after a very sedentary lifestyle for many years (im 37), I started a job which requires quite a lot of heavy lifting, and I've definitely noticed stiffness and pain in the muscles I'm using most, mainly my fingers and arm muscles. I can't clench my fist without pain and I've also noticed that I lose circulation in my arms much more readily, sometimes just from sitting in one position for too long.
not sure what that's about.
My gf also noticed pain in her hands when she started the job (shes doing the same thing in a different building) Might just be you weren't used to gripping so much, for her i beleive it was trigger finger but worth getting a checkup for if it doesn't go away
I had this so badly when starting manual labour at... probably 25, not sure. My fingers in the morning, holy shit. You are overdoing it, I know I was. I think it's just from gripping things, and then swelling on the joints. I'd wake up with big sausage hands and spend ages rubbing my knuckles, which actually feels really nice.