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. I mean, because this is, I think, more pivotal. I 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, you know, how sore I was dictated how successful of the workout was. It was a more sore, the better. Right. And honestly, this heads you down actually a really bad path to building muscle. What ends up happening is you end up, your body is 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 the training of muscle group one time a week, right? Because, you know, and when I, when all of this stuff started coming out on frequency and frequency, frequency was, was, was king in that it was, you know, 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. 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, you've trained the body so hard that you've, 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 workout, three workouts a week on legs, which I wasn't able to do when I was training that in 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, 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, 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 going to go to the gym and be 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. You'll find that the soreness will actually dissipate within the workout. Right then and there, you'll start to feel the soreness go away and then you'll start to recover faster. Yeah, as long as the intensity is appropriate. That's right. Intensity has to be appropriate though. 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 going to react to it inevitably. So finding that right amount, that right dosage of stress within each workout really does. It takes practice. As I've gotten older, I've definitely tried to voice like less is more. That used to never be my message. It was always like, you get over it. You get through it. It's really not that advantageous for you to blast yourself right out of the gates like you would think. Be mindful of that. There's going to 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 the way you use soreness. That's how I use it now. I still use it as a gauge, but it's more so to tell me I over did it. That's not like I was a young kid lifting. I used to chase the soreness and it used to be like, if I wasn't crippling soar, it was like, oh, I didn't get it hard enough. I didn't do enough where I have the opposite idea now. It's like, okay, if I feel really sore or even if I just feel pretty sore, I'm like, 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. If I'm limping or someone pokes me in the chest and I'm like, oh, if I'm sore to the touch, that's way over. I'm overdoing it. I did not need to stretch that far to get the muscle building benefits of not only the breaking down process, but also the adaptation process. 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. 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 it's 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. They do oftentimes happen at the same time, but healing does not mean adapting. Just because your sore and your body heals, it doesn't mean it's going to go then and get stronger. 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 then 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. 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 in healing. Damage in 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. It doesn't have time, it doesn't have resources to do so. It's just going to 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.