Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [209]
Occasional acute soreness, unless it is extreme, is no impediment to training. In fact, many records have been set by sore athletes. If you are not training hard enough to produce occasional soreness, and are therefore not having to train while sore, you are not training very hard. Waiting until soreness subsides before doing the next workout is a good way to guarantee that soreness will be produced every time, since you’ll never get adapted to sufficient workload frequency to stop getting sore. Extreme soreness that interferes with the normal range of motion must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and you will need to decide whether to train through the soreness after you have warmed up carefully and thoroughly. But in general, if the warm-up returns the movement to the normal range of motion, you can do the workout. Some alterations in programming and recovery strategies might have to be made if it is determined that the soreness is the result of an accumulated lack of recovery from the preceding several workouts.
In contrast to normal soreness, which by its nature is delayed for several hours after the workout, an injury can be defined as something that happens to the body that causes pain in a way that is not the normal consequence of a correctly performed exercise. An acute injury is immediately perceived as pain or discomfort in an identifiable structure and persists after the movement has stopped. The injury could be a disruption of the structure of a muscle belly, tendon, or ligament, or, less commonly, of an intervertebral disc, a knee meniscus, or an articular cartilage. Most training-associated injuries affect the soft tissues; bony fractures are extremely rare weight room events. If pain occurs immediately in response to a movement done during training, it should be assumed to be an injury and should be treated as such. Chronic injury is usually an inflammatory response to the overuse of a joint or its associated connective issue due to poor technique or excessive training volume. Tendinitis and bursitis are common diagnoses and are usually the result of repeated exposures to maladaptive stress. It is extremely important to develop the ability to distinguish between injury pain and normal soreness, since your health and long-term progress depend on it.
When you return to training after some time off, you must consider your de-trained condition. Depending on the duration of the layoff, different approaches are taken. If you have missed just a few workouts (fewer than five or six), repeat the last workout you did before the layoff. You should be able to do this, although it may be hard. This approach results in less progress lost than if significant backing-off is done, and the following workout can usually be done in the order it would have been had the layoff not occurred.
If the layoff has been a long one, a couple of months or more, take care when planning your first workout back. If you have been training with weights for long enough to get very strong, adaptations have occurred in more than just your muscles. The neuromuscular system – the nervous system and its interface with the muscles – has adapted to training by becoming able to recruit motor units more efficiently, and it is slower to detrain than are the muscles it innervates. It remembers how to lift heavy weights even if the muscles are out of shape. This neuromuscular efficiency is quite useful when you are in shape, but when you are de-trained, it allows you to lift more than you are actually in condition to do without incurring adverse effects. Spectacular soreness, as mentioned earlier,