 Question is from Matt Ammo. How reliable is it to judge progress based on soreness? Is it possible to be sore and not be making progress in terms of building muscle? I love this question, man. Because this is, I think, more people. You haven't addressed this in a while. And I think more people than not make this mistake. I made this mistake forever. I mean, chasing the soreness and thinking that how sore I was dictated how successful of the workout was. The more sore, the better. Right. And honestly, this heads you down, actually, a really bad path to building muscle. What ends up happening is your body's constantly trying to recover from all the damage you've done that you actually don't allow it to adapt and progress. And this was a really hard thing for me, especially when I started to go from training a muscle group one time a week. And when all this stuff started coming out on frequency and frequency, frequency was king in that it was far superior than the intensity in one workout. If I could hit that muscle three times in the week versus one time really hard, I would see change. The problem was when I first made that transition, I still had that train that hard mentality. And I took it into the two and three times a week. And I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not progressing. I'm getting weaker, if anything. But that was because I was hammering my body and I wasn't backing off the intensity. And technically, when we're really sore like that, it's actually technically a sign of overtraining. People don't, if you read the literature on that, it's you've trained the body so hard that you've gotten really sore. So the idea of chasing really being really sore in order to try and build muscle is completely false. And some of the best gains that I started to get was when I backed off of chasing that, I was able to get three workouts a week on legs, which I wasn't able to do when I was training that high intensity chasing soreness. I looked at it more like practice and perfecting the squats and the dead lifts and the movements, not worrying about going to failure. And that's when I started to see my body really progress. But that took me years to get out of this mentality. Oh, same here. So there's two myths around soreness. One is that really, when you get really sore, it means you had a good workout. And then the other one is that you should never train a sore muscle. Those are both two myths. So let's start with the first one. Soreness indicates potential that there was maybe some damage. If you're really, really super sore, you probably overdid it. My best progress in my workouts and my clients was often when they didn't get sore. It was often when we would work out the next day they'd say, oh, I feel a little bit, but I'm not really sore. That was usually the right. So that's when I would use soreness. The way I would use soreness would be if they were really sore, I know I did too much. Other than that, I didn't really make a big difference. Now, the other myth is that you don't train a sore muscle. And I used to fall prey to this when I was a kid where, oh, it's chest day, but my chest is still sore. That means it's still recovering, so I can't work it out. Actually, you'll recover faster. Now, if you have to work it out with a low intensity, you're not gonna go to the gym and beat the crap out of yourself again. But if you're sore, sometimes the best thing you could do is stretch the muscle and exercise it, work it out a little bit. And you'll find that the soreness will actually dissipate within the workout. Like right then and there, you'll start to feel the soreness go away and then you'll start to recover faster. As long as the intensity is appropriate. That's right, intensity has to be appropriate though. So that way it's restorative. Yeah, I think, and this is a tough one, especially when you're first starting out because all this novel stimulus, all this new stuff that you're trying to learn, like your body's gonna react to it inevitably. And so finding that right amount, that right dosage of stress within each workout really does, like it takes practice. And so as I've gotten older, like I've definitely tried to voice like less is more. And like that used to never be my message. It was always like, oh, you know, you get over, you'll get through it. And like it's really not that advantageous for you to blast yourself like right out of the gates like you would think. So, be mindful of that. Like there's gonna be soreness involved, but reducing that and trying to find the right dose of exercises to build upon is much more effective strategy. I like what you said, Sal, about like the way you use soreness. That's how I use it now. Like I still use it as a gauge, but it's more so to tell me I overdid it, right? That's not like I'm, like as a young kid lifting, I used to chase the soreness. And it used to be like, you know, if I wasn't like crippling sore, it was like, oh, I didn't get it hard enough. I didn't do enough. I didn't do enough where it's, I have kind of the opposite idea now. It's like, okay, if I feel really sore or even if I just feel pretty sore, I'm like, ah, I overreached more than I need to. I want to feel like I just, I could tell I worked out. The next two days I want to feel like, oh yeah, if I flex that muscle, I can feel like it's been worked and it's a little sore. But if I'm limping, you know, or someone pokes me in the chest and I'm like, oh, you know, if I'm sore to the touch, that's way overdoing it. I did not need, I didn't need to stretch that far to get the muscle building benefits of not only the breaking down process, but also the adaptation process. And it's a very, that's a sweet spot. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to stretch your capabilities just enough that the body is forced to adapt a little bit. And maybe there's a little bit of damage done that you have to repair, recover, grow and strengthen. But what you don't want to do is overreach so much that it's one, going to hinder the next workout. And two, your body is taking most of the nutrition into prior to just recovery. And it's actually impeding on your workouts in the next couple of days. Healing and adaptation for the sake of this argument are two separate things, okay? Now they do oftentimes happen at the same time, but healing does not mean adapting. So just because you're sore and your body heals, it doesn't mean it's gonna go then and get stronger. And in fact, if you're listening right now, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're plateaued and you're getting sore every single workout and you're not sore and then you work out and then you're sore and then you rest and then you're not sore and you work out and yet you're in the gym and you're not stronger, your body's not changing, muscles aren't building, all you're doing is healing and all you're doing is creating damage and healing. Damage and healing, you're not allowing your body to adapt. Adapting is on top of the healing process or again for the sake of this podcast, you can consider it as something separate. And getting too sore, creating too much damage, all that does is makes your body need to heal. It doesn't even think about adapting, doesn't have time, doesn't have resources to do so. It's just gonna heal, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're trying to progress, then you're just spinning your tires in the dirt.