Is muscle soreness a good thing?
And perhaps the craziest challenge ever from ATHLEANX.
Going to cover it all in this video.
What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM
We've got three things to cover in this video.
I mentioned two in the beginning, but I want to talk about soreness, muscle soreness, because
I get a lot of questions about whether or not it's a good thing.
And whether you should train with it or not, so I want to cover that.
I also want to tell you about perhaps one of the craziest challenges ever, not done
by me but someone that submitted it in, and I'm going to tell you a little quick story
about that.
And then tie it all together with these three bottles that are sitting in front of me.
Ok But first let's address muscle soreness.
Now the question is always on peoples mind.
Should I train with muscle soreness?
Is it a good thing?
I don't know whether or not I should work out if I'm feeling sore?
Here's the key thing guys, you've got to differentiate, what is the soreness?
Ok, are we talking about muscle soreness or are we talking about joint and tendon soreness?
So a good way, I feel a quick easy way to sort of tell you guys how to do that would
be, is to locate where the soreness is.
If you can say, like for biceps, that you feel pain after training, and generally again,
if it's from your workout and doing good muscle damage,
it's going to probably come in that 24 to 48 hour after the workout time period.
But if you can touch somewhere in the actual muscle and feel the discomfort, more than
likely it's going to be because of your workout, and that's a good thing.
If we're talking about the extreme ends of the muscle, so down here or up here where
the muscle originates or attaches, not really a great thing.
More than likely you are shifting it down towards a tendinous injury.
Something that you should probably stay on top of, or maybe the best treatment would
be to get out of the gym and rest.
Ok.
Most often with overuse injuries, that's the case.
Same thing like down in your, let's say you were training your calves, or you were running
outside on the sand, on the beach and your calves were sore the next day.
Great, that's a good thing because they were not used to the stimulus.
But if you're starting to feel that lower, down into the achilles tendon,
again that slight shift is going to be a good sign to you, that maybe you overdid it and
did damage to something other than your muscle.
So that would be the case.
Now some people find that if it is in the muscles themselves, like let's say from leg
training workout, it actually benefits to do something really light.
So if you hit your legs hard with weights, the next day you're really sore, or two days
later, you're really sore, it could actually benefit your legs to go take a fast walk,
just to get them working so you get some blood flow there because the blood flow will help
to eliminate the lactic acid.
Finally there is one other way you could do it, you could, if you had someone around you,
have them move your limb through space.
So again, if you're having shoulder discomfort.
So right here, you're not sure whether it's delt or whether it is inside the shoulder
capsule or joint.
If you raise your arm up yourself, ok and it hurts, it could be either joint or muscle
pain.
If someone else then comes and completely passively raises that arm for you and you
still have pain or discomfort, then you've probably got joint pain because you're taking
the muscles out of the equation.
So if you've got somebody around to help you out, let them do that, and you might be able
to differentiate whether or not you have something to work through or something that you should
not work through.
Alright, now we've discussed soreness, let's talk about guys that have definitely created
soreness here with this insane challenge.
I'm going to read just a little bit of an email that was sent to me and then sort of
break down the most important part and how that sort of transitions into the RX supplements.
Someone wrote into me, "Jeff, I hope you are able to read this.
My friend and I are 18 years old and been following your program since AX1.
Truly respect your knowledge, creativity, craft of fitness".
Thanks for the compliments.
" We've been taking your RX Supplements like it's our religion.
And I can honestly say that, they are without a doubt, the best supplements on earth.
We've tried everything on the shelf.
Nothing compares to the purity, power inside of these three black bottles."
Great, and that's not a plug.
They are not being paid to do that guys, but this is the email.
So the important part.
"With that on our minds, we got inspired by the challenges of ATHLEANX."
As you guys know who follow our programs we have ATHLEAN challenges built right in to
each and every week of the workouts.
"We decided to push ourselves to an insane challenge.
It definitely falls into the realm of overtraining, but keep in mind that this is only done once,
and absolutely not weekly.
It was inspired by your 300 workout.
143 reps of Pull Ups, assisted Pull Ups guys.
143 reps of 95 lb Deadlifts. 143 Push Ups. 143 Box Jumps on a 24 inch platform."
It goes on and on, I'll put the whole letter down in a description here below.
But the point is he did that 3 times, each time within an hour.
So you're looking at a 3 hour workout, which is about 2 1/2 hours longer than I recommend.
And 3003 total reps which is,God knows how many more reps than I recommend.
However, he acknowledges that it was crazy.
We've already gotten through that.
But he said, "I'm sure if you've read this far, you're convinced that we're mental."
You said it, not me.
"And the truth be told, we are.
But we are smart with our supplementation."
He took his pre-workout beforehand.
Ok, one scoop beforehand. 3000 reps later, he took two scoops of post-workout XLR8.
Went home and two scoops of the recovery shake, and then they crashed.
Then they were out until later that evening, asleep I'm assuming.
They took two more scoops of the RECONSTRUXION, and they fell asleep until the next day.
The crazy part is, besides the challenge, was they were not sore.
Not sore, like at all.
My only guess is that it had to be the supplements.
"It's true, we train hard, we train long but it would have been one or the other without
your supplements, motivation, inspiration, and a little insanity."
So, here's the point that they brought up guys, is, there is a connection between muscle
soreness and recovery.
Obviously, the faster you recover, the quicker you can get rid of muscle soreness.
Supplementation, I believe, that's one of the strongest places that supplements play
a role.
Now for those guys who know anything about anabolic steroids.
First of all you should know they're incredibly dangerous and you should stay away from them
with your life.
The fact of the matter is, mechanically the way they work is by speeding up recovery,
almost making muscle recovery a non-issue.
Ok, these guys that have used anabolic steroids are basically training and training and training
and training, but because their recovery is almost instantaneous, they can accumulate
these high volumes.
And that's how they see the results.
For us guys, that avoid that stuff and look for natural ways to get bigger, get stronger,
get faster.
We have to look at ways we can improve our recovery.
So muscle soreness is an important issue.
It's not something to be ignored.
With the RX Supplement Series, my biggest priority when I created these was, what can
we do to address muscle soreness.
We know that we have to elicit muscle soreness to have some sort of a stimulus to get bigger
and stronger.
So with a pre-workout, you want to be able to have the necessary intensity to go at your
workout and give it a good effort.
Because that's where you give the stimulus to create some of the micro damage in your
muscles that will promote recovery, that have to be recovered.
Right, in order to be able to get back bigger and stronger.
So you take care of that.
In the post workout, you want to have a supplement that will initiate that repair process quickly,
right, because you have a completely different environment inside the muscle cells after
a workout than you did before.
Your post-workout is critical to try to initiate that repair process.
And I think the biggest most overlooked aspect of supplementation and recovery is what you
do before you go to bed.
We've talked about stretching, and I think you should do your stretching before you go
to bed.
I also think that supplementation, high grade protein, have the nutrients in place to be
able to help the repair process especially when the repair process kicks in the most,
is when you are sleeping.
It's all part of the process guys.
The right supplements can easily improve your rate of recovery.
And if you can improve your rate of recovery, the rate that you can get rid of muscle soreness,
the faster you can come back and train hard again.
So, a long video here.
I hope you stayed until the very end.
But the key point is, muscle soreness.
Is it a good thing, bad thing?
I think it is a prerequisite to making improvements.
But how you deal with that muscle soreness and how you approach it from a holistic standpoint,
it's really important.
And again, ATHLEAN RX, for me, is what I use and apparently here with these guys, these
crazy guys.
I've got to give them credit, Nathan Eswine.
Congratulations!
You came up with the craziest frickin workout I've ever heard of in my life.
But you survived and thank God.
Alright guys, that's it.
I will be back here with more videos.
Leave your questions, because it's guys like this that spark these sort of videos and ideas.
So if you have a question yourself, let me know and maybe we'll maybe cover it here in
a video.
In the meantime if you haven't tried the ATHLEAN RX Supplements guys, you're going to want
to try it.
You know experience the sort of effect that these guys have.
And you can get these at ATHLEANRX.COM.
Alright, guys, I'll see you back here in just a couple days.