Hahaha, sounds like a plan! 🙂

Perhaps you are pushing yourself, Lisa, even when you don’t get sore.

Reading your blog, I wouldn’t say you take it easy.

I tend to be a little bit sore, never a lot. Then I go back to training and “dissolve” it with more hard work! 🙂

Very good point. I wager it’s two things that tend to happen together, but aren’t really related.

Doing a new exercise often will get you toward more muscle growth and then you get sore at the same time. However, the soreness happens because the body hasn’t yet raised the pain threshold for that exercise. It could also happen when you do it with low weight and high reps and are much into the endurance range (that doesn’t lead to muscle growth).

Or to put it more simply: the new exercise likely will still force muscle growth when the soreness has gone.

If you aren’t getting sore, but then change up your work out and are sore the next day, I would think that is a good thing… your body telling you

a. this is new
b. i need to grow to adapt to this new challenge

In that way, the soreness may be a good indicator of a good change in your workout.. which you should do regularly anyways…

Thoughts?

Exactly. It is this direct feedback that explains why we think soreness = good.

There is one theory that says it’s specifically eccentric movements that cause the most soreness – your experience strengthens the idea.

And you are one very fit woman! Goes to show how unreliable soreness is.