I’ve started pumping iron, and the two-days later much-worse soreness intrigued me, as it has, as I found out, people for over a century.
Can someone go over my understanding of the “repeated-bout effect” discussed there?
Does that mean that, now, when I go back to the gym after two days, I do get the benefit of having my subsequent (“delayed”) soreness ameliorated somehow, and that after a year or so, my body will say “you didn’t know the half of it, Bub” after similar exercise (although presumably scaled up, but with similar damage)?
Don’t worry. In general, for reasonable levels of weight training, you will feel less and less muscle pain after the first couple of weeks of regular exercise. (In my experience, the soreness you feel now can typically be reduced by going to the gym and exercising the same muscles.) However, if you stop lifting for several weeks, your next session will induce muscle pain again. If you stop for a full year, it’ll be as bad as if you had never been to the gym.
Note: If your “pumping iron” is of the Crossfit variety, I have no idea what’s going to happen to you, and I’m not sure anybody does.
No, you are misunderstanding the article. The soreness you are experiencing now is as bad as it gets. Over time, as long as you continue exercising, the soreness will diminish. In my experience this happens pretty quickly, within about a week for me.
If you then stop performing that particular exercise for a few weeks, and start again, you may experience some moderate level of soreness, though not as bad as when you first started. The article is saying that, if you stop for a year and then start again, the soreness will be about as bad as it was when you started the first time.
The point is, repeated bouts of the same exercise minimize the extent of soreness you experience. If you stop repeating the exercise, this effect reverses over time, as the muscle loses whatever adaptation it developed to minimize soreness.
Long time black iron lifter here, and there is little that is standard about DOMS. Some people are like Absolute, they’ll experience them for a couple days after each lifting session for a week or two when they’re starting up then they go away. Some people intermittently experience DOMS off and on throughout their lifting lives. Fortunately I think that is rarer, based on anecdotal experience from other lifters. I’m in the category of people that almost never get them, but I know guys who have lifted just as long as I do, and never miss a workout any week, 52 weeks a year, and they will still sometimes get some mild DOMS.
DOMS is associated with eccentric work only, and it is not indicative of a successful workout. Usually, you’ll only notice it with the first few workouts after a layoff. Once you’re back into the routine again, you shouldn’t feel significant DOMS. There are other types of soreness that are not as painful you’ll start noticing then.
The interesting thing about DOMS, to me, is that it highlights your weakness.
You can be someone that can overhead press 200lbs with no soreness the next day, but if you were to hold 50lbs over your head for 20 minutes you’d be sore the next day and even more the day after! It shows how quickly your body adapts.
Some new trainers come upon the false assumption that you should constantly change exercises and “confuse” your body thereby inducing DOMS frequently and therefore growth. This is completely incorrect. You need progression.
Right now my biggest problem is tiredness–I’m low-carbing it (not ketoacidosis nonsense but low low) to try to get my glucose back within hailing distance, and haven’t changed my Metformin or consulted an endocrinologist or nutritionist because just now I don’t have the former and never thought I should see the latter.
