Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [208]
Speaking of gym bags, get one, put all your stuff in it, and keep it with you. That way you’ll always have your shoes, belt, chalk, training book, Band-Aids, tape, Desenex, spare shoelaces, extra shirt, towel, knee wraps, straps, and lucky troll doll. Don’t worry about making a fashion statement with your bag. Just get one and take it with you every time so that I don’t have to spot you a towel.
Soreness and Injuries
There are two more things that everyone who trains with weights will have: soreness and injuries. They are as inevitable as the progress they accompany. If you work hard enough to improve, you will work hard enough to get sore, and eventually you will work hard enough to get hurt. It is your responsibility to make sure that you are using proper technique, appropriate progression, and safe weight room procedures. You will still get hurt, but you will have come by it honestly – when people lift heavy, they are risking injury. It is an inherent part of training hard, and it must be prepared for and dealt with properly when it happens.
Soreness is a widely recognized and studied phenomenon. Despite the fact that humans have experienced muscle soreness since the Dawn of Time, its cause remains poorly understood. It is thought to be the result of inflammation in the basic contractile unit of the muscle fiber, and the fact that it responds well to anti-inflammatory therapy tends to support this theory. Since muscular soreness has been experienced by so many people for so long, many misconceptions about it are bound to develop, and they have. What is certain is that lactic acid (a transient byproduct of muscle contraction) has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Soreness is usually produced when the body does something to which it is not adapted. A good example of this would be your first workout if it’s not properly managed. Another example would be your first workout after a long layoff, which can, if handled incorrectly, produce some of the most exquisite soreness a human can experience. Anytime you change a workout program, either by increasing volume or intensity or by changing exercises, soreness normally results.
The onset of the perception of soreness is normally delayed, anywhere from 12 to 48 hours, depending on the age and conditioning level of the athlete, the nature of the exercise being done, and the volume and intensity of the exercise. For this reason, it is referred to in the exercise literature as DOMS, or delayed-onset muscle soreness. Many people have observed that certain muscle groups get sore faster and more acutely than others, and that certain exercises tend to produce soreness, while others, even when done at a high level of exertion, produce very little.
The part of the rep that causes most of the soreness is the eccentric, or “negative,” phase of the contraction, where the muscle is lengthening under the load rather than shortening. The eccentric contraction probably causes most of the soreness because of the way the components of the contractile mechanism in the muscle fibers are stressed as they stretch apart under a load. And this explains why some exercises produce more soreness than others. Exercises without a significant eccentric component, like the power clean, in which the weight is dropped rather than actively lowered, will not produce nearly the soreness that the squat will. Squats, benches, presses, deadlifts, and many assistance and ancillary exercises have both an eccentric and concentric component, where the muscles involved both lengthen and shorten under load. Some sports activities, like cycling, are entirely concentric, since all aspects of pedaling involve the shortening of the muscles involved. Cycling and exercises like sled pulling or pushing can therefore be trained very hard without causing much, if any, soreness. Since soreness is an inflammatory process, the harder an athlete can train without producing high amounts of muscle inflammation and the attendant unfriendly hormonal responses, the better that