It's
safe to say that muscle soreness is something
EVERY trainer has experienced at some point
in their career. Severity of muscle soreness
(known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS
for short) can range from mild discomfort when
you move to the point of being almost crippling.
One
of the most frequent questions I am asked is
"should you train when your muscles are
still sore?" The answer is not quite as
simple as some people make it out to be, though.
Many trainers will tell you "if the muscle
is still sore, don't train it." And, in
truth, for many people that's the safest answer.
But,
in fact, by NOT training when you're sore, you
could actually be missing out on results AND
slowing down your recovery!
So
what is muscle soreness? Muscle soreness is
basically damage to the muscle fibers as a result
of training. Without going into great detail
on how it happens and how the recovery process
occurs (which is beyond the scope of this article),
muscle soreness is your body telling you that
it's in need of repair.
Now
how can it possibly be GOOD for you to train
a muscle again while it's still sore? Here's
where we get into a contentious area. After
reading this, you may choose to agree with me
or disagree with me (if you've read my articles
before, you know I'm anything BUT conventional)
but all I ask is that you consider my arguments...
Now,
if you've never trained a muscle hard two days
in a row or trained it while it was still quite
sore, you're going to be in for a shock at how
unique a stimulus it can actually be. Sure there
are arguments against doing that, e.g. the muscle
hasn't fully recovered and you'll be tearing
it down even more.
But
consider this...from an adapatation standpoint,
of the following two scenarios, what would give
your body the greater stimulus for growth?
If
you train the muscle hard once, you'll get a
good growth stimulus. Your body immediately
starts sending nutrients to the damaged area
and starts rebuilding. When the muscle is fully
recovered and is no longer sore, you train the
muscle again and restart the process. This is
the standard way of training and it usually
means directly training a muscle twice a week
with at least 2 or 3 days in between sessions
for that specific muscle.
In
the next scenario, you train the muscle hard
then the next day, train it hard again. Recovery
is nowhere near complete and the muscle is sore
when you train it on the second day.
Here's
the key...if you think about it, would the body
see this second scenario as a greater threat
to its survival? Would the body then ramp up
its recovery processes to try and prepare for
the next challenge, which it (from its recent
experience of being hit with the same hard stimulus
two days in a row) thinks is coming again very
soon?
In
my experience, this absolutely happens. The
body's response to training is a very simple
"stimulus-response" system, but your
body is also fully capable of sending more resources
where more resources are perceived as being
needed.
When
you eat, your body sends more blood to the digestive
system. Your brain doesn't tell it to do that,
it just happens. When you get hot, your body
produces perspiration. The same thing happens
with training. For example, when you train your
biceps, your body sends blood and nutrients
to the biceps for recovery. It doesn't send
it to the calves if the calves haven't been
worked.
If
you train your biceps hard two days in a row,
your body sees this as a big threat to the biceps
and will ramp up recovery processes to specifically
protect the biceps. If the biceps are still
sore... VERY big threat! THEN you allow the
biceps to recover. The two days of training
has built much greater recovery momentum, getting
more results out of your training.
Here's
yet another advantage to training a muscle when
it's still sore...even if you don't train it
hard, you will still be sending blood (and therefore
nutrients) to that muscle, helping it to recover
faster than if you didn't train it at all. So
even if you're not up for a hard workout for
a sore muscle, even giving it some light to
moderate work will still help with recovery.
So
I've talked about training a muscle two days
in a row...what about when you're scheduled
to train it a couple of days later and it's
still sore at that point? The same concepts
apply - your body will STILL perceive that as
a greater threat and increase recovery.
The
only times I would NOT recommend training when
sore is if the soreness causes you to use poor
form in your exercises or if the soreness is
so bad that it makes the exercises too painful
to do.
For
instance, if you just did deadlifts for the
first time in your life and the next day, you
have a VERY hard time sitting down without falling
down into the seat, you may want to wait a bit
before doing deadlifts again. Your form will
change because of the pain and it could lead
to injury.
But
if your muscles are a bit stiff or sore, go
ahead and train them. Your body will ramp up
your recovery processes in response.
How
do I know training the body with this frequency
can be effective? I'll give the best example
I know (WARNING - if you're a proponent of high-intensity,
very infrequent training, this will make you
shiver in your boots!). This is NOT a program
I would recommend lightly to anyone because
at this time, being on vacation from work, I
was basically only eating, sleeping and training...no
stress, no extraneous activity.
This
was one of the most extraordinary programs I
ever put myself on, not only in terms of workload
but results as well. It involved doing total
body workouts twice a day, six days a week.
This meant 12 total-body workouts per week,
increasing the workload every week.
I
used partial training, negative training, low
reps and high reps. For the entire first week,
I was EXTREMELY sore but I stuck with it and
trained everything twice a day, no matter how
sore I was.
After
3 weeks of this training, I backed off, still
doing 12 training sessions per week but splitting
the body in half - I was still working my whole
body every single day and doing partials and
negatives.
During
the back-off phase, my recovery processes were
practically unstoppable! NOTHING I did could
make me sore (and believe me, I tried!) and
my strength and muscle mass shot way up.
Conventional
wisdom would believe I would be completely totaled
at the end of a program like this, overtrained,
small and weak. My results? In 6 weeks, I went
from 208 lbs in bodyweight to 228 lbs. And as
an example in strength gain, I went from a 295
bench press for 1 rep to 350 lbs for 1 rep.
This
is a VERY extreme example of training through
muscle soreness and using maximum workout frequency.
But the take-home lesson from it is this: you
CAN get great results by training even when
you're sore! Your body will react to the stress
and ramp up recovery in response.
One
quick tip: if you want to decrease post-workout
soreness, try taking 500 mg of Vitamin C about
an hour before your workout. This helps protect
against muscle soreness.
