Hey everybody, so this is a question more pointed at weightlifters.

Imagine the scene, your working out hard, trying your best to get those last few reps in and feeling your arms dying, afterwards your weak and can hardly lift anything, then the next day you feel no pain!

My question is does anyone feel cheated or bad if they don't feel that pain the next day, I ask because I'm not feeling it today and I'm wondering did I really push myself yesterday.

Thanks

There are 2 types of general "pain" associated with weight training:

Friction-induced fatigue and Microtrauma.

I made up the term "friction-induced fatigue" because I'm too lazy to look up the clinical word for it. Basically, when you're working out, the fibers within your muscles are rubbing back and forth against each other. This causes heat and other bio-chemical byproducts that lead to eventual "failure." Failure is when you can no longer perform a rep with reasonable form.

Microtrauma is what you FEEL the next day or the day after that, due to tiny tears on the muscle fibers themselves. You will feel more microtrauma when you're new to working out, simply because your body at that time is made up of a muscle fiber type that breaks down more rapidly and violently than those contained in a conditioned athlete.

But I don't want to get off track.

Bottom line: You do NOT have to train to failure with every workout. Just like everything else in a healthy lifestyle, the key to success is variety and shocking the body from time to time.

If you sometimes train to failure, sometimes stop short of failure, and sometimes cause microtrauma, you will keep your body in a constant state of adaptation and growth.

The key is SOMETIMES. Don't be predictable because the human body adapts. Adaptation is actually the result of ALL training :)

My cycle just started over yesterday, and I'm at least 50 pounds stronger on the Big 3 lifts (bench, squat, deads).

Today my body is sore for the first time in 14 weeks, which was the last time I re-started my cycle. I do heavy weights for only 2.5 weeks at the beginning of each cycle and during this time is really the only time I notice substantial microtrauma.