I am trying to gauge whether or not I am being a pussy or if I am being smart. So, I thought that I would put the question out to T-Nation. Do you lift when you are extremely sore? I mean when it hurts like hell just to get up out of your chair?
Today my legs feel completely wrecked from a pretty successful squat workout on Tuesday. I have in my near future (3 hours) another grueling workout scheduled. While this workout does not include back squats I do have front squats and power cleans looming ahead. I am very much looking forward to the cleans, I just started them about 3 weeks ago and everytime I finish with them I feel great.
I just came off a recovery week so I should be pretty fresh. Spike seems to help aleviate the soreness, or it just focuses my attention elsewhere. I guess the driving question here is will I be doing myself more harm than good by going in and hitting it hard while I am sore? I dont want to go in a do a half ass workout; I did plenty of that before finding and making this place my home!
I don’t think it is smart to train a sore muscle, with regards to weight lifting. Although, I am no expert on this.
If your quads are sore, they are not going to be as strong as they would be if fully recovered, and you won’t get as good of a workout in.
I would wait until my quads are fully recovered before doing any lifts which target them.
BTW, I think it is normal to still be sore 2 days after a hard workout. It takes me 5 days to recover from 1 leg squats, which I just did.
If you’re extrememly sore, but still want to go through with something, then switchup your set/rep scheme.
If you’re doing heavy weights/low reps, then switch to lighter weight/higher reps (10-15 rep range). You’ll be recruiting different muscle fibers than the ones from before.
This works pretty dang well from my Quattro Dynamo experience.
Hopefully this helps. All in all, you’re the best judge of what you can or should do.
If you are that sore no. I will myself do some light work, maybe speed body weight stuff. Light sled dragging or just walking to get some blood in there to speed healing, but if you are in that much pain NO you need to let that tissue recover, grow, adapt and heal.
I was chatting to a college, who is well into his muscle physiology (PhD)
and he mentioned that there were (animal) studies that stated that the PNS/CNS recruits fibres that are not fatiged (sore?), leaving the ones that were trained previously to “rest”.
this therefore could have implications on hypertrophy, as more fibres would be recruited over a numebr of training sessions total.
MAybe this is why, when OVERREACHING (CT/CW…cant remember) and then resting, such gains are seen?
Well I took all the advice given and avoided lifting anything that targeted my PC or quads. I must say in doing so I had a tremendous session doing only upper body lifts. I have only been lifting for about 12 weeks and in that time I did 6 weeks of TBT and then I switched to a 10x3 and 4x6 total body training using 10x3 on one lift per day and 4x6 for the remaining lifts in TBTstyle. I have to say that I am seeing remarkable gains; expected as a newbie. I have spent a lot of time in the past doing retarded things in the gym that didn’t get me anywhere now I am finally seeing results! I plan to finish out my fourth week on this hybrid workout and then moving on to Dan John’s OLAD Program with some variation of course! I figure since i am a noob I can get away with including ancillary work without over taxing my system; time will tell of course.
I have taken some before shots and in twelve months I plan to take some after shots and then I will post them.