You’ve become a fitness machine, devoted to making your body feel and look its best. But is it paying off, and how can you tell? Some fitness experts don’t go by the number on the scale, or even by the amount of fat you lose along your waistline. When it comes to changing your body to make it sculpt, shape and redesign your physique, feel the burn! In other words, use the pain of sore muscles and muscle groups as the barometer for your gain.
Soreness is a Barometer For Your Progress!
Most people experience the typical scenario – During the few weeks of working out during an intensive strengthening program, they wake up sore and hobbling in soreness, step by step. Then, as the following months go by, although they are still working out just as hard, they are no longer sore. What gives? Is it due to a built up tolerance in your muscles, or are you not working out as hard as you need to?
Whether you’re brand new to the workout routine, or you’re two years into a strengthening program, the rule goes like this: Try out any new weight program, and if you lifted, lunged and plunged your body correctly, you should be relatively and noticeably sore within 24-48 hours. If you didn’t, you didn’t push yourself hard enough.
Think about how your body responds when under pressure at work. Let’s say that you’re up for a promotion, and you have to come up with the selling pitch to the CEO if you want to beat out your competition. You can’t get the job without exercising your brain’s muscles, right? You can’t get promoted without challenging your brain power to go beyond its limits. And the same process that your brain goes through during times of a potential promotion, so does your muscles when you stretch them to capacity.
As you lift, grunt and bend them with resistance training, they change, and transform for the better. With the right workout and intensity level, there is no limit as to how much stronger, flexible and fitter your body will become.
Your Body Will Tell You How It Feels….
Your body becomes sore under pressure. In other words, when you lift the correct amount of weight, and for the appropriate number of reps (without straining your joints, but challenging enough to breath heavily as you engage in it), that “soreness” you should have the next day occurs because your body is essentially rebuilding new tissue. Are you a gym veteran, and haven’t been sore lately? Try to add some more intensity to your reps.
If you aren’t sore, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t getting a good workout in. It means that progress is being made in a slow manner. Need a faster upper torso transformation, or toned legs by summer time? Crank up the intensity, simply by adding five to ten pounds of added weight to your exercises. And, as you do, your energy will increase, your confidence will skyrocket, and your ability to accomplish a toned body will be a piece of cake.
