If you’ve recently started or increased your exercise, and your body is feeling it, you might be wondering: Am I injured? Or am I just sore? 

It’s normal to feel soreness, mild pain, or discomfort when you: 

• Start exercising after a long time off (or for the first time!)
• Change the exercises in your program, or start a new sport
• Increase the volume or intensity in your current program

It can be difficult though, sometimes, to determine whether you’re just sore, or whether you’re dealing with an actual injury. Fortunately, there are some relatively clear signs that can help you figure it out! 

“Normal” soreness from workouts

Pain and discomfort that occurs after a workout can affect joints, muscles, and connective tissues (and often a combination of these things). Your discomfort might might feel: 

• Stiff
• Dull and achy
• Widespread, rather than in a specific point 
• Generally tender 

These feelings are the result of the muscle repairing and recovering from the effort of exercise. It’s perfectly normal for these to develop over and last anywhere from 12-72 hours, depending on how much your workout stressed your body. We commonly call this sort of post-exercise soreness DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness).

Other signs that what you’re feeling is normal post-exercise pain: 

• Muscles and joints look and function normally. There’s no swelling, redness, bruising, or feelings of joint instability or weakness.
• Movement like stretching or easy, warm-up type exercises actually feels a little good. 
• You feel better after some DIY treatment like foam rolling or massage gun, stretching, an epsom salt/magnesium bath, or an ice bath. 
• Feeling less strong or more fatigued than usual
• You’re not worried about moving, you just might be dreading it a little! 

Signs that you might actually have an injury

Exercise related injuries are divided into two broad groups: acute and chronic injuries. Acute injuries happen suddenly, such as twisting an ankle, or falling over and spraining your wrist. Chronic injuries come on gradually, as a result of repeated stress on your muscles, joints, and connective tissues. These include things like stress fractures or tennis elbow or golfer’s elbow. 

Signs that you have an actual injury, rather than just normal post-exercise soreness: 

• You have pain that comes on suddenly during training or exercise
• Pain is sharp, stabbing, catching, or grinding, or feels like a zap, tingling, or numbness
• You have sharp pain that occurs when you stress or load the muscle or joint, but feels ok otherwise 
• You are hesitant to use or move the painful area, perhaps expecting sharp pain or instability
• You feel like moving the area might cause it to give way
• You heard or felt a “pop”, followed by pain
• There is redness, swelling, or bruising around the painful area
• There’s no significant change to your pain after a couple of days rest

Sometimes it can be difficult to differentiate between normal post-exercise discomfort and soreness, and an actual injury, and these are by no means the only indicators that you have an injury. If you have any doubt about whether you should exercise with your level of pain, please don’t – seek help from an allied health practitioner. A physiotherapist or exercise physiologist is well placed to help you figure out what’s going on with your body, what you can do to keep training while you heal, and what you need to do for rehab. With the right plan, almost every injury can be nothing but a memory. 

What’s the most important thing about starting to exercise? Ask a thousand people, get a thousand different answers…

Well, maybe not that many. But there are lots of different opinions about this. People who are just starting back to exercising, or those that haven’t done much training before, are the people I work with the most. I answer this question fairly frequently!

I can’t give a “single most important” thing to do when starting to exercise. There are so many factors that keep people making progress and enjoying the process! But I can give you my top three:

Take It Easy

If you’re not used to being physically active, starting to exercise will likely be a shock to the system – both during a workout and in the days afterward. This post-exercise soreness, which is a marker of how much physical stress you put on your body, is not a selling point for a lot of people. The training is hard enough – do you really want to pay for it for days afterward? Most people say no.

To avoid being overly sore, keep your workouts short and low-intensity. They should feel easy enough that when you stop, you feel like you could have kept going for a while. By stopping before you’re tired, you limit the amount of recovery your body needs. This means less soreness, which in turn means you can go back to your preferred workouts sooner. It also means that you’re more likely to avoid injury – one of the key reasons people quit exercising.

Be Consistent

Building on the “not sore means you can exercise more” theme above, it’s also really important to be consistent with your workouts. There are two reasons for this:

First, your progress isn’t proportional to any given workout. Your nervous system (which determines how your body responds to the stress of exercise) will only respond so much to a single workout session. Essentially, you have to tell your body many, many that you want to be stronger (run faster, have more endurance, etc.) before it gets the message that you really mean it. That message only comes through with consistent, regular exercise.

Second, consistency builds habits. The neurological pathways that build an exercise habit also need to be trained just the same as your muscles. Anything that you do regularly will become a habit. (This is even more true if you set up conditions that make you more likely to do it.)

This makes consistency important for both physical and mental reasons. Find your routine and you’ll find more success.

Find What You Love (Or At Least Like)

It doesn’t matter how “good” your workout is if you hate it, because if you hate it, eventually you’ll talk yourself out of doing it enough that, presto, you’re no longer doing it at all.

Good news though: There are a million different things you can do that will make you stronger, fitter, and more energized.

Finding something you enjoy doing, or that will at least give you a sense of achievement. Many people try a few different things before they find what they like – it might take a while. But it’s worth it.

Doing what you like or love or satisfies you makes it so much easier to be consistent. (Though also makes it harder to take it easy when you’re starting, so watch out!) If you like running, run. If you like the gym, hit the gym. If you like walking the dog, go for a walk! If you don’t have to force yourself to exercise, you’re so much more likely to stick with it.

TLDR:

If you’re just starting to exercise – or starting back – find something that you enjoy doing. Don’t go crazy at the start: keep it short and sweet so you can go do it again sooner. Consistency really is the key to making progress and building habits. Train easy, go every day or two (provided you aren’t too sore), and have fun!

Results are in! Being strong makes everything better. It’s a huge factor in injury prevention and balance, and strength makes the activities of daily life easier. And if you are going to start doing cardio regularly, strength training might be your best friend.

Counter-intuitive? Let’s do some math and you’ll see why this makes sense. We’ll use running as an example:

Let’s say you want to go for a 10 minute run. During that time, you take many many steps per minute; for a slow jog, you might take 150 steps per minute (one step is contact on one foot to contact on the opposite foot).

How did I come up with that number? Many run-specific coaches suggest a running cadence of 160-180 steps per minute. Moderate pace walking has been measured around 100 steps per minute, and a vigorous walk may be as many as 130 steps per minute. Anyway.

10 minutes x 150 steps per minute = 1500 steps.

1500 steps is 1500 times the muscles in your legs contract. This is a lot!

Strength training lessens the load

Let’s transfer that 1500 steps into gym terms. Each muscle contraction (per step) happens the same way muscles contact during rep of a strength exercise in the gym. Essentially, you are doing a 1500-rep workout. Even a high-volume gym program wont come close to this, and you’d be training way past fatigue and into injury risk with any sort of external weight attached to that.

Even if you have no strength training experience – you know that there will only be a certain number of times you can lift a thing – say a bag of potatoes – before you get tired. If you lift heavy things regularly and repeatedly, you’ll be able to lift that bag of potatoes many more times. Strength training makes that bag of potatoes feel lighter, relative to the heavy things you lift at the gym.

The same thing goes for cardio. No matter what kind of cardio you do, your muscles have to move the weight of your body. If you get stronger relative to your bodyweight, each “rep” that you do during cardio (one step during a run, in our example) is less stress on the muscles involved. To put it another way: If you can squat one quarter of your bodyweight when you start a gym program, and can squat one half your bodyweight at the end of a gym program, the physical stress of 1500 steps is going to be much less, well, stressful.

Less load, less injury

Too much load is the underpinning for overuse injuries. As you now know, strength training is a great way to decrease load without actually cutting into your cardio time. But it’s still important to balance your overall load – the combination of strength training and cardio training – with enough time to allow for recovery and tissue repair.

Recovery processes range from simple things you are doing anyway (sleep, food, hydration) to optional extras like massage, ice baths or float tanks. No matter what you use or do, your recover time is when your body repairs from the physical stress of your previous training, and rebuilds a little bit stronger so that it’s better prepared for the next session.

Strength training for cardio: Rules of thumb

If you want to get better at cardio, you need to do more cardio, so this should be your primary training focus. However, I would aim to include one or two strength training sessions per week. Focus on compound movements (involving more than one joint, so a pushup rather than a bicep curl) and full body training; 2-3 sets of 6-10 reps over three major exercises will be a great place to start in supporting your cardio efforts.

Bottom line: If you’re looking to start a cardio program, think about building strength first. It’s a surefire way to make your cardio training easier, decrease your risk of injury, and overall, perform and feel better while you’re at it.

I’m trying to get back into shape after the last three years of having a really sedentary job. My muscles feel ridiculously tight from lack of use combined with getting older,  and I think they hurt more than they should. 

I want to start lifting weights again. Is it best to do cardio or stretch for the next month to get my muscles loose before I start lifting?

Taking the time to prep your body is going to make a huge difference to getting back into lifting weights. Being too stiff and sore after a workout is one of the main reasons people don’t stick with exercise, and weight lifting in particular can leave you a bit tender. Probably 90% of my clients are in your situation when I start seeing them. There are two things we focus on in the first few weeks to get muscles loose and lifting well.

First, focus on self-massage techniques. Muscles get tight when we don’t move much, which is pretty normal for a work-from-home situation (and months-to-years of lockdown). Tight muscles aren’t able to contract or relax as well as they could. This can limit the movement you can get from any joint connected to that muscle. In turn this limits how effectively you can lift. 

Decrease muscle tension by using a trigger point ball, a foam roller, or massage stick or massage gun, or another self-massage tool. If you have the ability to get treatment, get massage. Finding a good remedial massage therapist (or in the US, an LMT or licensed massage therapist) can be very helpful. Hands-on work is more effective simply because your appointment will last longer than the amount of time you’ll spend doing it yourself. Plus, your therapist can get into tight sports way more easily than you can. If you can’t get hand-on treatment, don’t worry. The DIY options will work just as well, though they sometimes take a little longer. 

Second, once muscles are loose, you can stretch effectively and appropriately. The way we use our bodies everyday shortens the muscles on the front of our bodies more than the back, so I recommend focusing your stretching efforts there. The biggest bang-for-buck stretches will be your pecs, your lats, your quads, and your hip flexors. 

You can work on self-massage and stretching at the same time. I’d spend one to three weeks with this as your focus. Taking this time will decrease the stiffness and soreness you feel when you start doing the heavier stuff. It’s also a great way to decrease your risk of injury generally. And once you’re feeling good and loose, a little loosen and stretch time makes for a great warm-up. 

For best results, take one to three weeks focusing on the self-massage and stretching before you start adding any significant weight to your workout. This gives your body time to recognise that looser, longer muscles are what you’re working towards, and adapt accordingly. You can maintain this by continuing with the self-massage and stretching as a part of your workout. (Life demands are still going to trigger muscle tension and shortening.) I prefer to use the foam roller and dynamic stretching as a general warm-up, but adding these to a cool down or as a stand-alone session also works. In the end, you have to find what works with your body and weights routine. There’s no right or wrong as long as it keeps you moving.

Yes, you can. Consistent exercise is actually way more valuable in building strength and muscle size than sporadic gym sessions that leave you feeling sore and uninspired (at best). There’s even a program called Easy Strength that’s built on this concept. Let’s talk about why this might be. 

Going to the gym means… 

Many many people think that going to the gym means always pushing yourself hard. As a result, for many people gym sessions also mean:  

• Sore joints and tired muscles
• Skipped workouts (not helpful in making gains or long term progress; skipping can make it harder to go back)
• Feeling flat, like you can’t get through the workout (almost as unproductive as skipping it entirely)

Not shockingly, sessions that make you feel worse are not motivational. For lots of people, it’s enough to make them skip a few workouts. That very easily leads to skipping a few more workouts. Then you might as well start again next month. Then you forget. Then it’s been six months and now it’s hard to get back into the habit…

Try this instead

Training moderately and consistently might be better for long term strength and muscle gains for a couple of reasons. It’s easier to recover from less demanding training sessions, so you’ll be ready to train well again sooner.

When you lift weights, your muscles get tired. They bounce back quickly during the session; rest periods of three to five minutes between sets should see your muscles recover to your session starting point. 

But heavy lifting – really pushing yourself to the limit – can mean enough overall fatigue to set you back for your next session. One study showed that after a short, intense weights session, the lifters only tested at a return to baseline level 33 hours after their initial session (read the study here) . You could assume then, that the more you push during a session, the longer it will take your body to be ready to go again. Lifting at a moderate intensity allows you to come back to it frequently. 

It’s about more than rest and recovery 

Consistent, frequent workouts also help your nervous system get better at recruiting your muscle fibers. As background: when you start doing a new exercise or a movement that you aren’t used to, the signals from your nervous system come through haphazardly to your muscle fibers (the individual muscle cells that contract).

The more frequently you complete the movement, the more smoothly these signals will start coming through. This makes the same weight feel easier, because more of your muscle is contracting at the same time to move that weight. It also makes the movement feel more coordinated and smooth. Long-term practice helps cement the nervous system signal pathways, resulting in what we commonly talk about as “muscle memory”. 

For most people, working out consistently with moderate effort is the way to go. You’ll minimise the aches, pains, and fatigue of pushing hard every session, and still make a surprising amount of progress. This is absolutely a winning approach!

Habits drive a huge portion of our daily activities, from small to large. If you pay attention, you might find that you brush your teeth the same way every day, or go through the same actions every day when you get home from work. These are the ingrained behaviours that let us live a lot of our lives on autopilot, and leave our brains free for thinking about important things.

While these automatic behaviours save us a lot of time and mental effort, not all habits are helpful. I used to head straight for a snack when I got home from work, even if I wasn’t actually hungry. Not super useful! But with a change in mindset, we can turn our less-useful habits into more useful healthy habits.

Be Mindful

It’s very difficult to change a habit without being aware of what’s going on. Mindfulness – simply being aware of what is happening – is key to creating this change. Mindfulness is most helpful when we apply it in layers.

What do you want to change

Identifying the less-helpful habit makes it much easier to change it. You might start this process by thinking about an average day for you. What do you normally do during your day? What actions happen when you get up, go to work, while you’re at work, when you get home, when you go to bed?

Most people can identify at least a few actions they take as they go through a normal day. (If you struggle to come up with a list, simply pick a day and pay attention to what you do as you go through your day as normal.) From this list, you could choose one or two things that you think aren’t helping you be healthy. Being mindful of any habit makes it easier to change.

What do you want to change to

Once you identify one or two things you’d like to change, you can plan what you’d like to do instead. This might seem like a very short, simple step, but it’s very important. Because habits are automatic, you might find you’re halfway through doing something you don’t want to do, before you even realise it. Knowing what you’d like to do instead will help you plan for this, and make it easier to not start the old habit in the first place.

Making the habit change

Consider the when, where, and how of the old, less-helpful habit. These cues are what tell your brain it’s time for that specific automatic action, and can also tell you when it’s time to put your new healthy habit in place.

By planning the steps of your new habit, you’ll be better prepared to put them into action. In my snacking example above, I knew that getting home from work was my cue. Rather than walking straight to the fridge, I had to find something else to do. So my goal was to stop for a moment, put my keys down in a certain spot (another habit I wanted to form), put away all my work stuff, and get together everything I needed for the next day.

By planning out these “substitute” steps and being mindful of what my cues were, I was able to avoid going into the kitchen until it was time to start dinner.

Added bonus: It’s easier to act on these plans when they are on your mind (this is mindfulness!). While I was working on making this change, I would try to think about the steps I wanted to take instead, at several points through the day. I found it especially helpful to think about them when I was on my way home from work. Remembering that I wanted to make the change made it a lot easier to put into practice.

Mindfulness made it possible for me to change this habit. Because I took the time to identify my habits, recognise my cues, and plan for a new healthier habit, it was a lot easier to not automatically stop for a snack. My plan has modified a little from my original, but I have stuck with the “put away” part of my new habit. Your new habits will likely evolve as well. This is fine, as long as you are on autopilot in ways that support your goals and health.

What is health? Great question. But more importantly: What does it mean to you to be healthy? I think it’s a very valuable question to ask, especially if you are considering making some lifestyle changes to move yourself in a healthy direction. 

There’s a standard dictionary definition of healthy: Showing physical, mental, or emotional well-being; being free from disease (From Merriam-Webster’s dictionary).  And the World Health Organisation defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

I read these definitions and I think “Yes, that’s not wrong.” But I also think that on a personal level, this can be much more specific. For each different human being, being healthy might mean:

• Decreasing the medication you need to take
• Moving without pain or restriction
• Waking up without feeling tired
• Feeling good after eating a normal meal
• Having the energy to get through your day without dragging

And of course, many other things could be “healthy” for someone. All of these do fit into the official definitions above, but as we get more personal with our own definitions, they become more meaningful and therefore more motivational.

Making “healthy” personal

If you aren’t sure what healthy might look like for you, there’s a quick thought exercise you can undertake to shed some light on it: 

First, pretend you are the healthiest version of yourself. This is a perfect world situation, so just for the moment, forget about all the things that might be holding you back from perfect health right now. Don’t worry about running around after the kids, a job with too many required hours or high stress, or a partner who just doesn’t like vegetables. Let your imagination run wild and really get to know this Healthiest You. 

Once you’ve spent some time with Healthiest You, you’ll have a better idea about what they might do for: 

• Eating and drinking
• Exercise or movement
• Work time and relax/unwind time
• Stress management
• Sleep routines
• Anything else that boosts your health

This is a great starting point for planning. It gives you clarity around what “healthy” actually means for you, and it helps identify some starting points to start moving in a healthy direction. Not bad for a few minutes of thinking!

Whether or not you need a personal trainer comes down to a few factors. One, how confident are you in being in a gym, or in designing your own workouts? Two, how much accountability are you looking for? I’d argue that with a bit of instruction (the internet is full of great resources) anyone can set up their own gym program. 

But just because you can doesn’t mean you’ll want to, and that’s totally ok! There are a number of reasons why hiring a personal trainer might be good for you. I would consider it if… 

You want some accountability.

Most of us have days where we don’t really feel like making an effort. A set appointment with a trainer often means we’ll turn up even when we don’t want to. And everyone always feels better when it’s done! 

You want some company.

If gym isn’t your thing, it can be boring. Someone tagging along and keeping you company can make it a lot more fun, especially if you get along really well. 

You want a plan. 

I have written a thousand gym programs, and yet I pay someone to train me. I just want to turn up and do the work. As an added bonus, having someone else plan for you means that it’s more likely your weaker points will be addressed; when we create our own workouts, we gravitate towards the things we’re good at. 

You’re looking for some guidance. 

Gyms, and especially the weights areas, can be intimidating when you aren’t used to them. A personal trainer can be your guide to the gym the same way you might hire a guide to go on safari in Africa. They can show you around, teach you the local customs, keep you safe, and generally help you learn to be more comfortable in a new environment. For some people, working with a trainer is the confidence boost they need. For others, it’s just a bit of insight into a new gym. When I worked as a trainer, I would occasionally have clients hire me for a session right after they joined the gym. They just wanted an indepth tour and to learn the how-tos for some of the more unusual equiment we had. That’s just fine! 

Guidance can also mean teaching. Your trainer should be teaching you to do things correctly. Eventually it will sink it enough to the point where you could do it on your own if you wanted to. 

You do better with a little encouragement. 

This goes hand in hand with wanting a little guidance. Sometimes you might not be sure you’re doing things right, or safely. Having a trainer with you can make all the difference, not only in you trying, but how hard you try too.   

Overall, personal trainers are generally great if you are healthy, not dealing with any injury (old or new), and not entirely sure what you want to do or how to do it. Everyone has their own reasons for working with a trainer. If that’s what it takes to keep you moving, go and enjoy!