Bodybuilding Forums

Okay... I always do as many reps as I can with every exercise. I keep a very detailed log & always try to push out more reps than the week before.

Anyway... even though my body will feel tight after a workout (sometimes for a day or two)... I rarely feel the sore "burn" that I felt when I first started working out. Am I still tearing the muscle enough to grow, even if I don't feel sore the next day? I truly am pushing it as hard as I can...

Thanks in advance!

I believe your body adapts and gets used to exercises if you don't mix it up. Due to this, I will switch things up (change exercises, change rep range, change tempo)from time to time.

NYC Male wrote:Okay... I always do as many reps as I can with every exercise. I keep a very detailed log & always try to push out more reps than the week before.

Anyway... even though my body will feel tight after a workout (sometimes for a day or two)... I rarely feel the sore "burn" that I felt when I first started working out. Am I still tearing the muscle enough to grow, even if I don't feel sore the next day? I truly am pushing it as hard as I can...

Thanks in advance!

Toeser is partly right - your body will adapt, you should change routines for that reason. If you're following any of the THT-based programs, you're already doing this every ten weeks. If you're repeating cycles, knock it off.

That "tight" feeling you describe is muscular microtrauma. That's the rip/tear/shred/smash-to-smithereens part of the anabolic process. Now, the actual soreness you get days later - that lovely ache and stiffness that gets worse before it gets better - that's delayed onset muscle soreness. In a very small over simplified nutshell, delayed onset muscle soreness is a sign of damage beyond ordinary cellular microtrauma. It's the result of using muscles that aren't accustomed to being used. Think of a new book. The first half dozen times you open it, the pages stick together, the binding cracks, and it won't stay open - but as you use it, that goes away, even though you still do a tiny bit of damage to the spine and pages each time you open it up and flip through. Same concept. This goes away over time simply because the muscle becomes accustomed to being used - though the mechanisms of why it goes away or just exactly what's adapting aren't clear. It may be neurological (the nerves just quit reporting pain), or mechanical (the connective tissues strengthening and thus minimizing damage) or cellular (improved protein synthesis means stronger fibers means less likely to be so utterly destroyed). Whatever the reason, if you continue to exercise, the delayed onset goes away.

Now, if what you're worried about is ensuring microtrauma to induce growth, you have better signals of that than delayed onset soreness - which is a bad indicator anyway, since the intensity of pain doesn't correlate to the degree of microtrauma, only to how long it's been since the muscle has been severely taxed. Your better indicators are stiffness (sans pain), reduced strength (which is why you dropset, why we walk weird on leg day, why things feel heavier to pick up on bicep day, etc.), and swelling (the "pump" at the gym, which frequently sticks around the rest of the day). Those do correspond to degree of microtrauma, and those are the signals you want to watch for as your affirmation that you're doing it right - as well as being able to lift more weight the following week and increases in your lean body mass.

TL;DR - Delayed onset muscle soreness going away, in and of itself, is your body's way of telling you that you are no longer a couch potato, and that's about it.

Thanks, JoH! That was very helpful!

I only get sore legs and sometimes shoulders. arms not often back hardly ever but I still train hard like yourself NYC Male.

If you follow and cycle between the THT workouts and keep on making gains in your following workouts don,t worry to much.