It's your first day back to the gym. For month's you've been doing body weight calisthenics and challenging your body in different and productive ways. But, nothing matches the feeling of have hundreds of pounds of iron strapped across your back or in your hands. At a deep and visceral level it is satisfying like nothing else. So you're excited to get back into the gym and see where your at...at everything. You start with squats because squats are THE KING. Then you move onto the bench, the overhead press, throw in some rows and pull-ups to keep things balanced, and then finish off with some deadlifts. Oh don't worry I haven't forgot about the most important exercise! You decide after the deadlifts to do a burnout set of curls and extensions. Now you are sufficiently fried and you feel great, but the soreness is already closing in on you. Actually, you've felt your adductors tremble ever since the second set of squats but the excitement helped you ignore it so you moved on. But now it's even hard to get up the stairs and you've literally just finished the workout, you weren't expecting to feel sore until tomorrow at the earliest and it's not like this was a ridiculously big workout, you only did about 2 exercises per muscle group max. You wake up the next day and as soon as you try to pull yourself out of bed you feel it. From your calves to your neck, everything is twinging in pain as you try to semi-squat yourself out of bed. It works, but you feel like every muscle in your body just tore at once. The rest of the day continues like this, you have so much muscle soreness and weakness that going for your evening walk, even though it's one of the best things you could do to heal, just isn't possible. It takes 3 days for you to stop feeling intense soreness and to be able to resume your workout routine. But instead of learning from your previous mistake, you wore the soreness like a badge of honor and ended up making this same mistake after every big and small layoff from training for the next 3 years...... SCENE
Don't be that guy
Don't be this guy, or rather, don't be me! Every time I took a layoff whether it was forced or voluntary, I would return like this. My excitement was commendable, I wouldn't say most people get their socks off to barbells and plates! But I let my excitement get the best of me and I would always over do it. This is bad because that intense soreness I felt isn't an indication that I made better progress that workout than I would during a normal workout. On the contrary, I actually didn't make any progress during the workout and lost about half a week of progress because of it. Why? Well, because when you damage your muscles so much, as is indicated by very intense soreness, it is counter-productive to muscle growth. Simply stated, your muscle has to be repaired so much that it cannot spend any resources on growth. This does not mean that if you're sore you aren't making progress. Actually, soreness really isn't a great indicator of progress once you become acclimated to training, although some soreness is fine. So, it's great to be excited to return back to training, nothing hits the legs quite like weights do, but remember ITS BEEN AWHILE. Take it easy the first few workouts. Think of it like this, you have to put minimal effort in to get max gain! Just a set or two of each exercise max and don't go to failure, then gradually bump it up over time until you're back to your pre-layoff workout volume. Oh- – and remember to have fun! Take this grace period to try out different exercises or styles of training you've been avoiding, you might find something you like or be more sure that the way you had been training was the best for you. Either way, don't be afraid to spice it up!