The myth surrounding muscle and joint soreness and how to use it to your advantage

Here's what soreness isn't, and that's an indicator of how hard you're working. Many people need to feel sore after a workout to confirm that they challenged themselves enough.

But muscle and joint soreness isn't a true indicator of this; we feel more soreness based on how novel a stimulus is.

For example. I started working with a new client a few weeks ago. She hadn't worked out in years and had some shoulder and back pain that we were working through. After our first session, she was ridiculously sore even though we kept things relatively conservative.

It took her almost four days to feel fully recovered.

Compare that to a session we did a few weeks later, which consisted of the same movements but at a higher intensity, which we worked up to over those weeks.

She felt no soreness whatsoever afterwards. Does that mean she worked harder during the first session? Not at all. It's just that the movement stimulus was new and not something her body was used to.

A good program has you repeat movements over the course of 4-6 weeks before you drastically change anything. That gives your body a chance to adapt to those movements and get stronger. And because of this adaptation, we recover faster from it and feel less soreness, even though we're demonstrating more strength and progressing our movements.

This makes muscle soreness not something we need to seek, but rather a good indicator of how our body is adapting to what we're putting in front of it. If you're less sore, it opens the door for more training and movement, which you can further adapt to.

For example. I'm training for a half-marathon right now, and if I want to reach the target amount of kilometres run in a given week, I have to pace myself and make sure I'm recovered enough to do so. If I feel too sore after a run, either going too far or too fast, it's going to affect the quality of my movement the rest of the week, sabotaging my training.

Soreness, or a lack thereof, can be a sign that you're responding well to your program. It can also be a sign that you changed too many variables at once if you find it's taking too long for you to recover.

Beyond a first workout, it shouldn't take you a week to recover from a single bout of exercise. That's a sign you pushed too hard. If you're rehabbing pain, feeling less soreness and more strength, even with similar pain levels, is a good sign that you're adapting in the right direction.

Pay attention to your body and learn how it responds to different levels of intensity. It will tell you everything you need to know about how to move forward.

To your good health,

Coach Stephen

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Thanks for reading.

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