Took eight months off and went back last Monday. Legs were fine on Tuesday, agony on Wednesday, and it's now Friday and going down stairs is still a project. I did what felt like a light session — squats with just the bar and some leg press, nothing heavy. Should I train again while I'm still sore, or wait until it's gone?
Completely normal after eight months off. Peak soreness at 48-72 hours and lingering for four or five days is textbook for the first session back, and it happens to people who've been training for a decade when they take a layoff.
The good news is the repeated bout effect: your second session will produce far less soreness than the first, and by session four it's mostly gone. You never get that first week back again in the same block.
Train again now rather than waiting. Light movement through the same range actually reduces soreness — go back in, do the same movements at the same light weight, and you'll walk out feeling better than you walked in. Waiting until it's completely gone just resets the clock.
The trap is waiting for soreness to clear, training hard again, and getting equally sore. People spend months in that loop and never build the tolerance.
Went in on Saturday feeling like a rusty hinge and genuinely walked out looser. Didn't expect that at all.
For the first three weeks back, deliberately leave three or four reps in the tank on everything and go home feeling like you undertrained. It feels pathetic and it's exactly right. Your tendons and connective tissue adapt much slower than your muscles do.
Soreness is also a poor measure of whether a session worked. Some of my most productive blocks produced almost none. Chasing it is a good way to overreach.
I think I'd absorbed the opposite belief entirely, that soreness meant it counted.
Drink water, eat some protein, and walk. That's about the extent of what actually helps. The rest of the recovery industry is selling to people in exactly your week.
@deficit_dot · 12mo ago · 2 replies
Worth naming the thing to actually watch for: soreness that's dramatically worse than this, with swelling, dark urine, or an arm or leg you genuinely can't straighten, is a different problem and needs a doctor the same day rather than advice from a forum. Ordinary stairs-are-hard soreness is not that. But it's the one exception where "push through" is bad advice.
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@thoracic_tim · 12mo ago
Rare, but it happens most often exactly in your situation — someone previously trained, coming back after a long layoff, doing more than they think because it used to be easy.
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