I'm going thru that "I just started working out" muslce soreness, and boy does it hurt. I feel pain in places I didn't know I had...
So today I happily but laden with guilt decided to sleep in. How do you balance the workout so that what you do today doesn't impact what you do two days from today?
Workout Tips to Prevent Muscle Soreness by: Monica
Hey Captain Pain,
Funny that you posted this question this week. I've had my own muscle soreness issues all week (mainly because I got carried away with my new 20 lb sandbell) and have had to completely change my workouts to accommodate this. I totally know how you feel.
Muscle soreness is bound to happen especially when you get started with a new program. Even when you are being careful with volume and resistance increases and avoid training to failure every single exercise, muscle soreness happens.
It's good to take a day off from the gym to recover but something that can work even better is going out for some moderate paced cardio or doing some type of restorative workout to increase blood flow to the sore areas. Read more about that in my Best Exercises When You're Too Sore To Workout post.
Now to your actual question which is how do you balance the workout so that what you do today doesn't impact what you do two days from today?
This is a great question and the best way to do this is to work in different planes of motion each time you train. Most people focus on very linear exercises in the sagittal plane or frontal plane. They rarely venture out into the transverse plane and hardly ever expand into circular movements. This is really the secret to being able to push your boundaries every workout without getting sore or injured.
Watch the video below to see some circular strength training in action. If you apply the 6 DOF to your workouts you can train hard every day and prevent the type of muscle soreness that keeps you out of the gym for days. I started using this with my clients about a year ago and the soreness issues have gone way down.
Let me know if it works for you. BTW, 6 degrees of freedom can be applied to any workout and can be used with any equipment. The sandbag is just an example.
