Can You Train With Muscle Soreness?

As a fitness personal trainer, the following are questions I get to hear very often from my clients.

a) Should you train when your muscles are still sore from the last workout?

b) If you workout your sore muscles, can your muscles grow or sabotage your result by over-training?

Muscle soreness or ache is something anyone training with weights is familiar with. The severity of muscle ache or DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) can range from just mild discomfort to the point of being almost severe ache. The answer to whether you should workout when your muscles are still sore is not quite as simple as it may seem. You see, most fitness personal trainers will tell you to take a rest when your muscles are still sore which is a reasonable advise and in all truthfulness, is the safest answer.

However, most people do not know that by not working out your muscles when you are still sore, you may possibly be missing out on better results and slowing down your recovery! Surprised? Gotcha there didn’t I.

Before we go further, we need to know why do we get muscle soreness when we workout hard enough. This is because muscle ache after working out is basically damage done to your muscle fibers as a result of intensive training. When your muscles aches from training, it is your body telling you that your muscle is in need of repair. That being the case, how can it possibly be good for you to train the aching muscle?

This is where we get into the controversial area of this subject. After reading this article, you may either agree with me or think that I am talking nonsense. Whatever the case may be, all I ask is that you give my presentation some thoughts.

Now, if you have never trained the same muscle group intensively two days in a row or trained it while it was still rather sore, you are going to be in for a shock at how unique a stimulus it can actually be to the muscles you are training. Of course, I concede that arguments against doing this are very persuasive and strong, such as “your muscles have not fully recovered and you are further damaging it”. I used to sing the same song too.

However, consider this issue from muscle adaptation point of view :-

a) What would give your muscles greater stimulus for them to grow massively? If you train the muscle hard once, you will certainly get a good growth stimulus. Your body immediately starts sending nutrients to the damaged muscles and frantically start the muscle repair and rebuilding effort.

When the muscles are fully recovered and is no longer sore, you train the muscle again and restart the rebuilding process. This is the traditional way of training and it usually means directly training a muscle once or twice a week with a few days of rest in between.

b) What if you train a specific muscle hard and then train the same muscle intensively the next day? That means your muscle recovery is nowhere near complete and the muscle is sore when you train it on the subsequent day.

Now, if you give this idea some thoughts, would the body see (b) as a greater threat to its survival? Would the body then revved up its recovery processes to try and prepare it for the next challenge, which it (from its recent experience of being shocked with the same hard stimulus two days in a row) thinks is coming again very soon and prepares itself even better, thus stimulating faster and bigger muscle growth?

Well, you will only know the answer if you experiment it on your own body but it does work for me and most of my clients. You see, your 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 does not tell it to do that, it is just hardwired programing survival instinct in your subconscious part of the brain. When you are hot, your body naturally produces sweat to cool you down. The same thing happens when you are training.

For instance, when you train your abs, your body sends blood and nutrients to your abs for recovery. It doesn’t send it to your hamstrings if your hamstrings haven’t been worked at.

If you train your abs intensively two days in a row, your body reacts to this as a big threat to your abs and will ramp up recovery processes to specifically protect the your abs. As simple as that!

The consecutive two days of intensive training to the same muscle has built a much greater recovery momentum and thus getting more results out of your training. Does that make sense?

Another advantage to training a muscle when it is still aching even when your training is light is that 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 are not training the sore muscle muscle hard, it will still help with recovery process.

Yes, I understand many readers may not agree with this theory about training when your muscle is still sore because we have been indoctrinated against it. The only way to know if it works for you is to try it out for yourself.

Chris Chew is a fitness, health and relationship consultant. Read his free articles at Testosterone For Bigger Muscles and How To Be Handsome And Attractive