PODCAST - how long should you feel sore
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host Johnny Ha, an ultra runner endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone a hundred K ultra. I prove them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned from breathing techniques to mindset shifts to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals, despite limitations, let's get started.
Why is it that you sometimes feel sore for days after an easy workout? Well, you may not feel sore at all after a [00:01:00] hard workout. Well, today I'm gonna share with you the two things that feed into why you may be feeling sore in some workouts and while after others you feel on top of the world. And then I'm gonna share with you when soreness may be a red.
Flag that you need to listen to and take it easier in your training sequence. Now, throughout my athletic career from being a soccer player to a long distance cyclist, to being a yoga teacher, to being a high intensity interval training enthusiast, to being an ultra runner, to being a tennis player, all these different things, I have gone through the ups and the downs of working out and feeling extremely sore.
And working out and feeling on top of the world. And really what I've learned is there's really two things that feed into if you're gonna feel more sore after a workout or not. And the first one is consistency. Well, have you ever noticed that the more you workout you not only have more power, [00:02:00] your lungs are stronger and.
You're less sore, the more often you work out, the less sore you are. So that means that if you take time off from working out, you may feel extremely sore when you get back into it, even the easiest workout. So that's why consistency is really the key. If you want to decrease how sore you are after any workout, do the workout more often.
The second thing though. Is, how often are you adding something new? When you add newness to your workouts, you are probably going to feel more sore, and the reality is you need. Both of these things when you're working out, along with the fact that all cause mortality rates significantly decrease by 35%, you need to consistently work out to see change in [00:03:00] your body, to get better at the sports that you're playing and to get better functionally interacting with the world.
You need consistency, but you also need newness if you are. Always doing the same thing, then you're not only gonna get bored, and this is what happened to me. After running a hundred mile weeks, way too many weeks in a row and doing 50 plus mile weeks for way too many years in a row, I got bored. You will also see that you can get overuse injuries.
You can also hit plateaus where you stop getting better 'cause your body needs newness. So you need both of these things in your workouts. So keeping these two things in mind, consistency and newness, how long should you feel sore?
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Now let's get back to the rest of the show.
Well, there are three types of athletes, and no matter where you are in your workout journey, you'll fit into one of these types.
The first type is a beginner, and I define beginner as someone who works out zero to two times per week. Well, a beginner is going to, on average, feel sore for three to five days. Three to five days. And this is why when you look at someone who works out every single day, or maybe your friends look at you and they're like, wow, like I'm always sore for what?
It seems to be weeks, but you are only sore for a couple days. Or maybe you don't feel sore at all. Well, that's because when you're a beginner, your muscles are not yet adapted to the loading that you're [00:06:00] putting on the body when you're running, when you're lifting, when you're playing your sports, whatever you're doing.
Your muscles haven't adapted. This is why when people look at me as an ultra runner, or maybe they look at you as an ultra runner as well, and they're like, how do you do it? Well, it's because your muscles adapt over time. But when you're a beginner and you're only working out zero to two times a week, or maybe you've taken time off, maybe you haven't worked out for a month or two, and then you go back in and you're working out and you're like, God, why am I sore for so long?
I'm usually not that sore. Well, it's because you took time off. Well, that's why I don't personally like to take time off. Yes, I try and take one day a week off, and I go through different seasons of life where I'm running more, I'm doing high intensity interval training, more. I'm lifting more, I'm playing different sports more.
All of that ebbs and flows, but I really keep on going because I, at the very least. I wanna be in the intermediate range, or [00:07:00] we'll call this the intermediates, beginners intermediates. Intermediates work workout, somewhere between three to four times per week. And when we're looking at how sore intermediates are, it's one to two days.
This is significantly less than beginners. Significantly. So if you want to decrease how long you are sore for, let's up our zero to two, to three to four, and then we are significantly decreasing the time that you're sore. This is because when you train consistently, you are developing adaptations in your body and this reduces the soreness duration.
So when people look at you and they're like, God, I just, I get sore just getting off the couch, and you're like, you know, I work out three or four days a week, I, I'm just not sore very much, like two days max. There's a [00:08:00] reason for it. You're more adapted. And that brings me to my favorite category. Were advanced.
For advance. This is people who train five plus times a week, and really if you're intermediate, you may as well jump to advance because just by working out at least one more time per week, you're gonna cut this down to 12 to 24 hours. Now I'll tell you this. You could be working out advanced five plus times a week and then start doing something new.
This is where the newness comes in. For me, I played tennis in elementary school, but I really started playing tennis consistently over the past couple of months, but I still only played tennis once a week. So think about this. If you're working out five days a week, but you're only doing one thing once a week, or maybe you're doing it once a month, you're throwing it in, maybe you're only playing soccer once a month.
Yeah, you're probably gonna be extremely sore after that thing. [00:09:00] For me, even with playing tennis once a week, I feel soreness for a couple of days. So I, um, even though I'm advanced, I feel soreness for one to two days. After playing tennis, typically after running, I don't feel sore at all. Maybe for 12 hours.
Probably the last maybe six hours. And really it's just in my heel. And even so when I do my plantar fasciitis exercises to alleviate that pain and get rid of my plantar fasciitis, I don't really. Feel it. So just because you're doing something new doesn't mean you're gonna feel sore for three to five days because you're not doing that thing three to four times a week or five plus times a week.
Really, what you need to do is look at where are you, where do you fit if you're in intermediate. Then when you try something new, then yeah, you may drop or dip close to the three to five. You'll probably be closer to the three. If you're advanced and then you try something new, then yeah, you're probably [00:10:00] gonna dip from less than 24 hours to, maybe it'll take you one to two days to get over the soreness.
It really depends on where you are. If you're a beginner and you keep doing all these new things and you never get to a place where your soreness is decreasing, maybe you just need to start picking one thing, or maybe you need to up to intermediate and just start working out three times a week, doing the thing three times a week.
Just by having a consistent routine, you're gonna decrease your soreness a lot. Now, sometimes your soreness is a red flag, and this is what to look out for. Sharp or stabbing pain. So instead of dull pain, you feel sharp pain, stabbing pain. This could be an injury, so you need to look out for these things.
Pain that worsens with movement. Let's say you're moving a specific way. I will find that even if it's not injury, if I've [00:11:00] overworked a muscle, we want to give it a day or two, depending on what level you are. If you're beginner, you may need more time. For me, in advanced, when I have a muscle that I've overworked, I need to give it a couple of days.
So this happened a couple weeks ago. I was doing a hit class and then the day after I had pain in my inner knee that shot down my leg, and it wasn't even there until I was doing squats. So when I was doing squats, I felt it. So I'm like, okay, I need to like deload how much I'm doing on these squats today.
I need to potentially not do as many. That's what I did. I did fewer reps. I did shorter range of motion. I did less weight. So when pain worsens with movement, this is a signal that you need to slow down. You need to do something differently. Your body will speak to you, sudden swelling or redness.
This is very important. A couple years ago I was playing soccer at my [00:12:00] godfather's house. We were just messing around. I was playing with my cousins and I accidentally ran into a rock garden. And I hit my shin really hard on the rock garden, and while I felt fine and I didn't really have any pain, I was bleeding a little bit, but I felt fine, but I had sudden swelling.
Sudden swelling means it comes out of nowhere. Now, there was something that caused it. I fell in a rock garden and I bruised the heck outta my leg, and then it ballooned This. It's extremely important to evaluate. My aunt was there and she looked at it and had me do a couple of things 'cause she's a nurse and we figured out that it wasn't anything crazy, but I needed to ice it and elevate it for a couple of days.
I needed to stay off of it. So what did I do? I stayed off of it for about 24 to 48 hours, one to two days, and then I took hikes and then a week later I was running. Actually, it was probably less than a [00:13:00] week later. It was a couple days later I was running. But the point is, you need to be aware. This could have been really bad.
I could have broken something. So look out for sudden swelling and sudden redness, sudden is the key. It comes out of nowhere or it comes in response to something that you. Maybe you twist your ankle, your your ankle balloons. Next is bruising. Well, in the same situation I had bruising pretty quickly.
Bruising could mean that there's something a lot worse happening than just being sore. Pain isolated in a joint, so a joint pain and you know, it can be really sharp. Gotta be careful there. Pain lasting five plus days. So if you're. In pain for more than the typical five days, and you may need to look at maybe there's a deeper thing, so five plus days, and then pain that disrupts your life or specifically disrupts sleep.[00:14:00]
And walking. This could mean that you have something out. You could have pulled something, you could have strained something, you could have broken something, you could have torn something. So you need to be very careful that when you are looking at soreness, is it soreness? Or is it something deeper? Now, I am not a healthcare professional, and I highly recommend that you talk to your doctor, talk to a healthcare professional disclaimer in the show notes and in the description below on YouTube, and if you wanna take your health and wellness to the next level.
I have my three pillars of healthy living guide. Movement tracking and accountability. You can grab your free guide in the show notes or in the description if you're watching this on YouTube, or go to www.athletewithasthma.com/healthy-living-guide to grab your free copy today. I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I hope today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations [00:15:00] you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection. It is about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals, and if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible.
