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QUESTION:
Dear Charles,
I'm on a split routine, working
out each body part twice a week. My partner and I are trying
a new exercise tempo, really emphasizing the the negative.
When our second pec day came around, we were both too sore
to get anything done. Do you need more rest after negatives?
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ANSWER:
Muscle soreness
is almost always an indicator that your muscles are still repairing
themselves. After exercise, the release of an amino acid
called hydroxyproline is released to repair microtrauma in the muscle
fibers.
Being a very toxic substance, hydroxyproline
irritates the nerve endings, causing tenderness (soreness is NOT
caused by lactic acid, by the way). Re-training these unrecovered
muscles will only damage them more — if you repeat this
pattern habitually, you may very well end up with a traumatic injury.
Eccentric training is universally
accepted as being more traumatizing than concentric training. If
you've ever taken a long hike up a mountain, camped overnight, and
then hiked back down the next day, you might have noticed that you
woke up feeling relatively unscathed, only to find that you got
very sore the next day.
This is because the hike up is primarily
concentric work for your quads, and the hike down is mostly eccentric.
As a rule, wait one entire day
(some of my colleagues would say two) after your soreness has disappeared
before training the same muscle(s) again. Don't worry if it
seems like your training frequency seems insufficient— the
vast majority of people train too often.
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