I am specifically talking about weight/strength training. I know you want to sort of loosen the sore muscles by doing something like walking or whatever, but should you lift weights when you’re still sore from the last time?
Depends on how sore you are. If it’s the sort of soreness that you can only feel in a concentrated contraction, there’s no reason not to. If it’s the sort of soreness where it hurts when you’re not moving, you need to do recovery work and not do whatever got you that sore. Anywhere in between, and it depends on what exactly you’re trying to do.
Recovery time is generally 48-72 hours. You should wait 48 hours before exercising the same muscle, particularly if you are sore. Exercising a sore muscle shouldn’t be a problem if the soreness is just from your last workout and not an injury. It’s very important to warm up and then stretch beforehand, because soreness is often accompanied by tightness in the muscle. I learned this the hard way when I had sore hamstrings from a workout then kicked a soccer ball cold and ended up with a bad hamstring pull.
The Australian military did a study of new soldiers in training. Half exercised with out stretching. Half stretched. They found no difference in muscle pulls.
http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/aegis/Stretching/StretchingMain.htm Before you ask. But this is not the one I read .
Yeah, static stretching pre-workout not only doesn’t seem to offer much protection from injuries, but it can make you noticeably weaker for the next hour or so. Not a great warmup, if you ask me. Mobility drills are all the rage amongst the in-the-know circle these days.
Cite?
Anyway, warming up is important, regardless of stretching.
First, I want to echo the comments about streching. Definitely warm up before you work out, but static stretching DOES make you weaker. You’re better off stretching after your workout.
Second, you build muscle when you’re recovering and not when you’re working out. Recovery is just as important the workout itself. It is entirely possible to over-train and actually make yourself weaker. It really depends on how sore you are and how long you’ve been training. If you’ve recently started, you could be sore in the same muscle for more than a week after training it, but you shouldn’t go much more than a weak without training the same muscle.
I’d say, go ahead and train on your schedule and gauge how your body reacts. Obviously, you can’t always go the full length you’d like before working out a muscle again (eg, legs, then needing to do cardio; doing shoulders and then chest , both using your triceps and anterior delts).
Further, how long you should wait between working out the same muscle depends on your purpose (simply being in shape, powerlifting, bodybuilding, sport, etc.) and the intensity of your workouts.
We may be able to provide better advice if you can give us some more information about your workout, goals, and how long you’ve been training.
From my personal experience (so take it FWIW):
If you are not injured and are just suffering muscle pain from overexertion go out and do the same workout over again. The pain will lessen or disappear. I know this sounds counterintuitive but it works.
That’s why coaches don’t worry about overworking the players early in training camp. The players may think they are dying but in a few days the pain will disappear and they start to get a lot stronger.
Studies are indicating that stretching pre-workout leads to more injuries and stretching post-workout leads to fewer injuries. Cite
Stretching is not the same as warming up and there are two types of warming up. Cardiovascular warm-ups like jumping jacks or bike/treadmill get your heart rate elevated and help relieve muscle stiffness. But you should also warm up for every exercise movement by doing the movement with light resistance and this is a good time to gauge your level of soreness. Do 15 to 20 reps of the movement with light resistance and wait 2 minutes and then see if this has made you feel less sore. I usually find that this warm up eliminates all my soreness and I’m ready for full resistance training. If the warm up doesn’t relieve the soreness, then I let my body tell me what to do. There is a difference between the soreness caused by a hard workout and the soreness of a pulled or torn muscle and if you’ve been training any length of time you should be able to identify this easily. Training should not be painful except for the pain of the burn if you are training to failure. If the pain of training doesn’t stop as soon as you let go of the weight, you are injured. Err on the side of caution. For me, it’s easy. There is the “good” soreness of a killer workout and the “bad” soreness of a strain. They just simply feel different. The main thing is the good soreness usually disappears as soon as I get warmed up. The bad soreness persists throughout my first work set and then I back off.
If you’ve been training more than a few weeks, significant soreness is a sign of poor nutrition (IMHO) and you need to look at your pre-workout, during workout and post-workout nutrition. Supplementing with BCAAs post-workout is also helpful for preventing soreness. I train very hard twice a day on training days and I rarely have any soreness and I believe this is only possible by careful attention to nutrition.
Dr. John Berardi is an expert on recovery strategies and his articles can be found at t-nation.com and his own site johnberardi.com.
Good luck and have fun with your training!
Thanks for all the advice so far. Also thanks to daffyduck for his input on the heart rate thread; it was helpful, although it caused me to impulse-buy a heart rate monitor.
My fitness goals are to loose ten lbs and improve muscle tone. I do not want to get “big.” I am reasonably fit now, but I used to be in excellent shape, and have lately been just walking about 12 miles a week, no strength training. Until about a week ago. I did some lifting that didn’t seem like too much at the time, but I was really sore the next day–just sitting there aching sore, not flexing sore (which I enjoy, makes me feel like I’ve done something). It did go away after three days though, so I’m back on track and feeling good. I’m eating lots of protein, fruits, and veggies and keeping my calorie intake to about 1200-1400/day. Excellent results so far.