Training With Muscle Soreness
Should You Do It? And Can It Actually Help You Get BETTER Results?
By Nick Nilsson
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!
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.
