Blog / Training
Why you are sore for three days now
Recovery after fifty is not uniformly worse. Some parts of it are almost unchanged and one part is genuinely slower, and knowing which is which is the difference between a programme you can run for a year and one that stops in week five.
What actually takes longer
Connective tissue. Tendon, and everything holding a joint together, adapts more slowly than muscle does, and it always did. At twenty-five the gap was small enough that nobody noticed. At fifty-five it is the gap that ends comebacks.
That is why the elbow, not the muscle, is what stops most men in week six of a new programme, and why the answer is almost never to train the muscle harder.
What has barely changed
The ability to recover, as opposed to the speed of it. A well fed, well slept man of fifty-five recovers from a moderate session in about the same shape as he used to, just over a longer window.
The soreness itself is also not the useful signal it feels like. Being wrecked for three days is evidence that the session was unfamiliar or too big, not evidence that it was good. New movements produce far more soreness than hard ones, which is why week one of anything hurts most.
Three things that are usually the real cause
Not enough protein. A body that is short thirty grams a day is a body rebuilding slowly, and it shows up as soreness that outstays its welcome. This is the most common cause by a distance and it is invisible until you count for four days.
Not enough sleep. Recovery from training is largely something that happens while you are asleep. A man training hard on six hours is paying for a session he is not collecting.
Too many hard days too close together. Three sessions a week with a day between them works. Five does not, and going from nothing to five is the most common structure among men whose comeback lasted a month.
How to structure the week
Three sessions, never on back to back days. Every session under forty-five minutes. One exercise per session taken close to failure, chosen before you start rather than after.
On the days between, walk and do the ten minute mobility sequence. Movement on a rest day speeds recovery up rather than costing you anything, as long as it is not another session wearing a disguise.
The deload nobody takes
Every fourth week, run the same sessions at two thirds of the volume. Same exercises, same weights, fewer sets.
Men over fifty who take a deload week every month can train continuously for a year. Men who do not tend to get about ten good weeks and then a fortnight off with something that hurts, which is a worse average and it does not feel like it at the time.
When soreness is not soreness
Sharp, specific, or one-sided pain is not muscle soreness. Neither is pain in a joint rather than in the muscle around it, or anything that comes with weakness rather than stiffness. Those are worth stopping for, and the men who do get back sooner than the men who do not.
