SHOULD YOU ALWAYS BE SORE?
Should you always feel pain after your workout?
There’s always the need to feel gratification when working out.
That’s understandable as it’s normal to expect your body to cry out from the effort you put in.
Most gain their satisfaction from soreness, being drenched in sweat or even drained post session.
But the real question is should you always be sore though?
When you first start a routine, you may hit muscles you haven’t reached before, and that’s where people say, ‘I felt muscles I never knew I had!’
See this comes from the tearing of small muscle fibre tears caused by the overload from either strenuous lifting or a new workout.
As much as resistance, volume of reps and sets will influence the stress the muscles are under, the fact is you will almost certainly feel what is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) from a new routine or workout that your muscles haven’t been used to.
DOMS from a workout is an indicator of a hard workout but not necessarily the best indicator to a good workout. It is common, however DOMS shouldn’t be a recurring thing post workouts. Repeated episodes of soreness is the perfect road to putting your body into an over trained state.
As much as I’m not an advocate for the over training principle, it is important that you implement a few basic yet effective methods into any physical activity routine you are involved in to avoid the wrong repeated feeling.
To reduce the level of DOMS post workout:
· Warm up with a light jog or low resistance exercises
· Dynamic stretches pre workout
· Gradual progression through workout
· Cool down, Static stretches at the end
· Incorporate foam rolling into your stretch routines
After a few weeks of the same workouts, your body adapts to the stimulus, and you’ll no longer be sore. To continually see muscular adaptations, use the principal of progressive overload to consistently increase the difficulty of your workout by either adding extra load, changing the rest time, or manipulating other workout variables like sets, reps, and tempo.
It’s good to have such feeling of satisfaction, but the truth is performing well and building your body to look as good as you want it to, comes with gradual progression. Let that understanding exist after every session and watch that smile appear.
Committed to a better you
