In Q&A No. 4, we’re tackling a new round of topics centered around the topics of soreness, pain, and building muscle.

As always, if you have any questions you’d like answered in a future Q&A feel free to contact me and I’ll add it to the mix!

On to the questions…

How much pain is too much pain when I lift? I’m worried about overdoing it and not recovering from my workouts.

Pain is often associated with lifting weights and training hard, but there are different ways to look at it.

In fact, I’d like to include the word “soreness” to go along with “pain” in this discussion to help identify what is acceptable and what is not.

Soreness is common and completely normal in the 24-48 hours after training. The technical term is DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) and it’s somewhat an indicator of how hard you trained, or have been training over the last 2-3 days.

Monitoring soreness is smart and easy to do. In many ways, it’s unavoidable. If you lift on Monday and wake up sore on Tuesday, you immediately feel it when you hop out of bed.

Anyone who’s been training semi-regularly or more know what this soreness feels like. Moving around hurts a little bit, and you can feel it specifically in the muscle groups you trained the previous day. Flexing or stretching those muscles comes with a noticeable, but manageable, amount of pain.

This general soreness is completely acceptable and not something to worry about. It’s when you get into the territory of “pain” that you should pay closer attention.

Pain can occur in your muscles, where it’s a step above general soreness and you have trouble moving a specific muscle or muscle group. The muscle(s) may be sore to the touch. You also may feel pain in your joints, where doing regular daily tasks becomes difficult.

Pain can even get to the point of not being able to use a muscle at all. You may have trained it so hard that the muscle or joint becomes damaged to the point of injury.

These are all signs that I, as your coach, would tell you to scale things back. First, we’d take 2-3 days off to recover. Get adequate sleep, eat well, etc. It could be that you just trained way too hard — too much weight, or too many sets/reps than you can recover from — and need a break. If you start to feel better after taking that mini-break from training, you should evaluate your workload and find ways to scale things back with your training moving forward.

Don’t just jump right back into the same routine that caused so much pain in the first place. Look to scale back either the overall load (weight) you’re lifting, or cut out some sets/reps to scale the training volume down a bit.

If the pain doesn’t subside during that 2-3 day break, it may be necessary to see a specialist to determine whether or not you’ve suffered an injury that needs more attention.

Please keep in mind: I am a coach, not a doctor or physical therapist. This is the general progression I’d go through with a client to determine the severity of soreness and/or pain. Most times, if you suffer an injury you know it — something happens during a workout and you immediately feel a tweak, twinge, or worse. If that doesn’t happen, it normally tends to be an overuse injury that requires rest and recovery techniques, followed by adjustments to your program in order to avoid a similar injury moving forward.

It seems like I can do 150 different variations of squats in a workout but still not have any luck adding mass or strengthening quads, etc. Any suggestions?

The problem may be that you’re doing 150 different variations…

I recently wrote an article about how to effectively get started building muscle, and in that article we talked about how a good place to start is 10 hard sets for each muscle group.

I can’t tell you how many people I see doing 20, 30, or more sets per muscle group in the gym each week.

More is not always better, which is tough to accept or comprehend, but it’s the truth. Just because you can do a ton of sets for quads, it doesn’t mean you can recover from that much work.

The best bet is often to strip things down, get back to a manageable level of volume, and carefully track your progress. So let’s say you scale things back to 10 sets a week for quads. Answer these questions for me…

• Are you able to slowly add weight to the movement over time?
• Are you seeing your scale weight slowly go up?
• Are you seeing improvements in the mirror?
• Are you eating adequate protein each day?
• Are you getting 7+ hours of sleep each night?

If the answers to all, or most, of those questions is “yes,” you’re on the right path and I want you to keep doing what you’re doing. If most answers are no, it’s time to reevaluate things.

Another important factor in muscle growth is, can you feel your muscles working? Can you feel your quads stretching and contracting as you perform your squats, or other quad-focused exercises?

The more you can feel the muscle working while it’s under load/tension, the more success you’ll have.

Generally, I think this issue is normally caused by doing too much volume. Scale things back, focus on the muscle, and aim for slow progression over time.

Do you ever feel increased pressure in your heart/chest area when you lift? As I increase weight, I’ve noticed almost a soreness in my heart and pain, and I’m not sure if that’s normal.

When I’ve felt pain that’s not muscle-related, 90% of the time it’s turned out to be tied to how much weight I’m lifting.

Aka… I’m lifting wayyy to heavy.

As I mentioned above, I’m not a doctor or physical therapist. I can’t necessarily answer this question as an expert, but as a coach I’d recommend you first evaluate what movement is causing you pain and how much weight you’re lifting.

For this question, you note pressure in your chest so I’m going to assume it’s when you bench press or do some other type of pressing movement. It has the potential for fitting the description of needing to lighten the load, as the bench press is one of the classic “ego lifts.”

“How much do ya bench?” Everyone wants to measure their worth in the gym with this lift.

When you lift weight that is too heavy, your body has to compensate and call other muscles into action. When pressing, you may feel more pressure on your triceps, elbow joint, and shoulders when the weight is too heavy.

My best guess to answer this question is that the weight is too heavy, and that’s what’s happening.

So my recommendation would be to lighten the load and focus specifically on feeling your muscles work. And let’s be more specific — I want you to feel the intended muscles working during the movement.

So when you’re pressing I want you to feel your chest working. Scale the weight back until the pain you described is gone, and then focus on working the pecs.

You can increase the weight over time, but make sure it’s gradual and slow. The goal here is to build muscle and strength. It’s not a race. You’re not on a deadline. Work, build, grow, repeat.

Do it responsibly, and avoid injury.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope you found this Q&A helpful. Like I said at the top, if you have a question you’d like answered, contact me and I’ll add it to the mix! And if you’re interested in taking your fitness or nutrition to the next level, check out my coaching page and let’s talk about how we can work together on your next program.

CGF