Body for Life Day #10 Training: Upper Body
You're in the second week of the Body for Life Challenge and you've done a bit of weight training already. Chances are, you've also felt a bit of soreness. Before you get concerned, that is a good thing.
Generally the day after you do weight bearing exercises (weight training, lifting), you'll feel some soreness in the muscles that you used the previous day. This soreness is an indication that you have challenged your muscles to grow and they are meeting the challenge. Now, if you wake up completely unable to move then you used entirely too much weight and deserve what your body is giving you in the way of pain messages to the brain. If it is the kind of soreness that makes you remember that you have those specific muscles, that is great.
Rather than bore you with all the scientific terms, I'd like to explain this muscle building process in layman's terms. It is fairly simple:
Weight training causes muscle damage (good damage). Little tears occur in the muscle fibers as you work out (good thing).
Once you stop working out, your body very effectively and efficiently goes to work to prepare your body for repairing those tears and building more muscle fibers to prevent such damage from happening again. Whatever you eat after a workout (hopefully it is healthy, but more on that in a future blog) gets sent to your muscles as fuel for the repair and rebuilding process.
This repair and rebuilding occurs while you sleep. Your body uses the fuel you've given it to repair any torn fibers (not to be confused with muscle or ligament tears) and to build even more muscle fibers in preparation for another workout. When you wake up, your muscles may feel a bit sore. Just think of it as the first day for those new muscle fibers that were built the night before. You may also notice that your muscles look a little bigger. That is because they are. Take comfort in that because bigger muscles require more fuel and that means your metabolism is growing higher and you're burning more calories than you were before.
This process continues as long as you continue to challenge your muscles with weight bearing exercise. Eventually, women will stop building muscle when they reach a certain level of muscularity. It is impossible for a woman to "bulk up" without the assistance of additional human growth hormone. We just haven't got it in us to get big and manly. Men, on the other hand, have about 900% more testosterone than women do and can grow to rather grand proportions quite naturally. (More on that in a later blog.)
For now, keep challenging your muscles to grow. When you stop feeling that little bit of soreness, it is time to add more weight to your training routine.
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