Skip to main content

Workout Tip: You Should NEVER be Sore

Matthew Sloan trains very high-frequency and is rarely sore!

 


Your workouts should not make you very sore.  It sounds odd, I know, especially when someone first hears it.  But it's true.


I'm rarely, if ever, truly "sore" after any of my workouts nowadays.  I sometimes have a small soreness the next day, but it's more a feeling of tightness, a "good soreness", if there is such a thing, that is usually from a new exercise the day before, or doing an old exercise in a new way.


I shouldn't be sore, but you shouldn't be sore, either.  If you are, you are doing it wrong.  Don't worry if you're now angry with me, since it could be that you have been doing workouts wrong your whole life, especially if you're now trying to remember a time when you were not sore from a workout.


Let's say that your max squat for 10 repetitions is 225 lbs.  And let's say you do those 10-all out reps in a workout on Monday.  Even with one set, you are going to be sore until Thursday - assuming it was a true "max" set.  But if you do 5 reps with 225 on Monday, you can come right back in the next day and do 5 more reps on Tuesday, and then, guess what?  You can come in Wednesday and do another 5 reps, and same thing for Thursday - another super easy set of 5.  You could keep doing this until 5 reps gets just too easy, then you could do 6 reps using the same philosophy, then 7 reps eventually, and so on.  At some point, you would be doing 10 reps every day, and you would never be sore.  Oh, and you would have probably built quite a lot of leg muscle - not to mention overall size or bulk - by this point, as well.


I'm not saying the above method is what you should use, or that it's even the most efficient way to workout, but it's an example to show that you've probably been doing it wrong.  Most people are in the same boat.  And, unfortunately, most will continue to be in this very same boat of thinking "good" workouts mean workouts that make you "sweat" or make you "exhausted" by the end of it.


But the majority are always wrong on every subject you could think of - and that's just the way that it is.  And if you think that's hyperbole, or that it simply can't be true, then pick any subject that you know a lot about, and see if the majority understands that subject?  The majority of people will always know "general" information.  They will know that working out is good for you, helps to build muscle, staves off the effects of aging, and helps to keep you trim.  But knowing how to go about achieving those goals?  That's something else entirely.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

High-Volume Hypertrophy

  A State-of-the-Art Mass & Power Program for Outlandish Gains      I’m fond of some forms of training over others.   This doesn’t mean, however, that I believe there is one training program or method that reigns supreme.   Some may make such a claim as that.   HIT enthusiasts—who seem to think like the Highlander in that there can be only one —I’m looking at you.   But there are also individual lifters and coaches who stumble upon a program that really works well for them , and they declare it to be the one program that stands above all others.   No, I believe that there are quite a few different training methods and programs that are effective.   But some are decidedly better than others, depending on your goals.   I like full-body workouts, high-frequency training, Russian-style power programs, routines that utilize the “big 4,” and old-school “classical” bodybuilding routines.   Those are all different, by the...

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

  The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan  magazine.      In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.”  I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time .  In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

Real Bodybuilding: Old-School Arm Specialization

  An Old-School Program for Shirt-Busting Biceps and Titanic Triceps       This essay is the start of a planned series on old-school, real bodybuilding training.   It is a follow-up, however, to an article I wrote earlier this month entitled “Real Bodybuilding the Old-School Way.”   That article has proven popular enough that I figured there would be interest in an entire series on the subject.   So, I guess this is technically the 2 nd part, even though I never intended that first one as part of a series when I wrote it.      I would advise reading that article before continuing here (and not just because it will help you understand this article but because I think it’s a pretty damn good read even if, you know, I’m a bit biased), but the gist of it boils down to this:   Old school bodybuilders built impressive size, strength, and definition (before the advent of large amounts of PEDs) by following 3 “stages” of tr...