Do you think this muscle soreness story is possible?

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posted by footballplaya8813

Muscle soreness is something that every trainer has
experienced. The typical advice is to wait until you're not
sore to train that muscle again. But what if you can
actually get BETTER results by training when sore!

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. I went from a 295 bench
press for 1 rep to 350 lbs for 1 rep. I did a partial top
range lockout squat with 1100 lbs for 150 reps (not a typo!)

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

posted by EL2

You couldn't do that for extended periods of time due to muscle atrophy, I don't care how genetically gifted you are! Guys in prison without access to gear have screwy training programs like that one, but they only do it once a month! (not identical but a similar way of trashing all muscle gruops in a short period of time) They think this "shocks" the muscle into new growth, there are some big guys in the joint.

posted by estray

I think them guys in the joint get so big cause of the amount of rest they get. All they do is sleep and lay around. Plus they have low stress too.

posted by Stricken

damn...wish i had looked at how long that was b4 hand, wouldnt have read it :P

posted by SMBLSBGARMS

Seems like something you could try for a week or two to shake things up. Don't know how long anyone could handle that before collapsing into exhaustion.
Plus sore muscles get hit indirectly anyway in a regular training routine.

posted by EL2

That is part of it, food and rest. This proves how important they are in bb, some of those guys can get pretty big without juice.

posted by SMBLSBGARMS

Yeah, but they don't get to eat chicken breast 7 times a day. go figure

posted by estray

Exactly. Their diet sucks yet they still get big. Rest is way underrated perhaps!

posted by SMBLSBGARMS

I agree estray. That sucks too. With a full time job, 45min commute each way, wife, 3 kids, lifting, when then hell am I supposed to sleep? :sleep:

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