Health and Fitness Myth Busters: No Pain, No Gain

The Myth: The best indicator of an excellent workout is that I should be really sore, especially on the day after.

The Reality: Muscle soreness is expected to some degree, especially if you're either a beginner, you have not trained in a long time, or you've made significant changes to your routine. But muscle soreness is certainly not the only way to tell that your workout was effective. In fact, if your nutrition is good and you are allowing adequate recovery time between workouts, muscle soreness should be minimized.

Given proper training, nutrition, and recovery time, strong muscles should be exhausted immediately following a workout, but you should not be in pain the following day. The "pain" you feel when you properly push your muscles is better described as "strain". If you are pushing to the point of true pain, then you need to either adjust the weight, the number of reps, or the intensity of your workout because over-training will definitely slow your progress. The truth is that training to pain will minimize your gains.

Train hard and pray harder,
Brandon