I feel incredibly sore today

I woke up to a HUGE amount of soreness.

My chest and back feel like they have tv static. My biceps and triceps feel like someone’s squeezing them with a decently strong grip. I have to do squats today…

I’m not annoyed though.

I’m actually very happy.

See I’ve been following the exact same workout routine for a while now. As you’ve noticed, do the same program for long enough and the soreness vanishes. Side bar, we have no idea what causes soreness.

So here’s why I’m so happy even though my wrists are aching whilst I type this.

Motor unit recruitment 🙄

• I’ve recently been focusing on reducing fatigue using the post workout meal

• I’ve been much more motivated during my workouts than ever before (I’ll write more about how to use this tomorrow)

• Both of these go hand in hand to increase motor unit recruitment

So why does any of this matter?

If you were around when I first become “not natty” you’d remember this article.

This spoke about how my medication acted as a central nervous system booster. It enabled me to get higher levels of motor unit recruitment, and I became sore for a period.

This is what motor unit recruitment will do.

Look we don’t entirely know what mechanism causes muscle soreness, but we know what causes it in our training.

So what does random soreness mean?

1. You came back from an untrained place where you’re no longer used to the sensation

2. You gave a muscle fibre a new sensation/higher degrees of sensation (i.e. more volume)

   1. You gave a muscle fibre a new sensation because it hasn’t been recruited before

Now you can see why I’m so happy when I get random soreness out of the blue.

This is a sign that I’m reaching up onto the high end of the motor unit pool, accessing muscle fibres that weren’t previously activated, and now feeling the side effects.

Because the only change in a consistent program could have been motor unit recruitment related, I know this isn’t from higher volume/more damaging work.

When everything stays the same in your program and you experience this, be happy.

It’s a sign you’re clearing fatigue, or increasing your voluntary activation.

This is a win.

Before you go onto the rest of your day, here’s a quick exercise I’d like you to do.

1. For each of the following areas write one easy thing you could do to increase motor unit recruitment by reducing fatigue

• Workout

• Sleep

• Nutrition

• Daily activity

• Motivation

2. Take a look at your options and pick something to work on

I hope you enjoyed today’s email. Even though I didn’t really teach anything, it ended up being a bit of a long one.

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher

P.S. I’ve been writing a LOT about nutrition recently, and I thought I was almost finished. Turns out I’ve had a few questions recently I’ve been wanting to cover before this chapter is closed for a while. Soon you’ll see an email on teenagers and weight loss, one of my favourite meals, a makeshift meal plan, if raw milk is worth it, how to effectively log weight change, and maybe some other stuff. If you’ve got any nutrition questions, now’s the time to reply and tell me what you want answered.