Maybe it’s function of my age, but I used to think I had a great workout when I woke up the next morning in searing pain, now I think I had a great workout when I wake up the next morning feeling great, with no pain anywhere.

Have I gone soft?  Hang on:

No pain, no gain:  wasn’t that the first rule of thumb we all heard when we first started exercising?  Well, I’m here to say that I think that old warhorse is dying.  With apologies to the exercise masochists, I just don’t think it’s true anymore. 

What’s the basis for this rule?  Lactic acid buildup, which happens during higher-rep strength training and other endurance-type exercise, causes pain and—probably—DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness), and, over time, if you train for it, you can become more tolerant of this kind of pain, and thus, complete more reps and more sets.  Bodybuilder types love to feel sore in their pecs and lats and such in the days following a workout designed to isolate these muscle groups, because then they know their efforts were properly focused.

Now, I’ll concede that if you’re doing high-rep work and you’re focusing on a specific area of your body, lactic-acid buildup will probably occur, and might even be desirable.  And some generalized soreness is probably inevitable for anyone who works out regularly and intensely.

But I no longer believe that isolation exercises should constitute a significant portion of a workout.  I’m actually starting to believe that the opposite is true:  the more muscle mass you call into play (assuming good form, of course), the better an exercise is.  To my mind, for example, and this isn’t a particularly original sentiment, the scapular stabilizers in your back should come into play when you bench press.  The glutes need to be turned on in just about every lower-body movement. 

In other words, the point of focus of your exercises should be on making the muscles work together.  Pushing, pulling, squatting, deadlifting and the like should all entail a coordinated effort from many muscle groups.  The more coordinated—balanced, aligned, focused—the better. 

You won’t be torching individual muscles with as much intensity with this method, bodybuilding-style; instead, the effort will be spread over much of your muscle mass.  This kind of work is systemically exhausting, but it doesn’t cause anywhere near as much localized pain and fatigue as the muscle-group focused work most of us are used to.  As I’ve written before in this space, a weight-training exercise is not so much a way of tiring specific areas in the body but of practicing and refining a particular movement.  

Does this mean you won’t ever be sore?  No—you’ll probably still wake up in pain at times.  But ideally, you’ll move better after this kind of workout than after the ‘twenty-sets-of-benching’ workouts you may be used to, where you can’t comb your hair when it’s over.  You’ll move with more ease and fluidity, because you’ve been practicing moving in a way that integrates the efforts of the entire muscular system. 

You’ll also be working very hard—probably harder than during isolation-style workouts, because almost every exercise will feel like a full-body challenge. 

Even if you don’t believe me, and you need your curls and tricep pushdowns and pec-deck flies in order to feel like a whole human being, it still helps to think about the whole body—the position of your neck, the orientation of your feet, your spinal alignment--even during the isolation work. 

Maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age, but if the point of working out is, in part, to make the daily physical demands of life easier, pounding the body until getting out of my car is painful and difficult seems kind of foolish.

More on this to follow.  Comments welcome.  Have a great weekend--A

PS:  Don't forget about 'Ask The Fitness Nerd'!  Still fielding questions on that FanShot to the right, and if you're lucky, you might get an ENTIRE BLOG POST dedicated to YOUR QUESTION!  And then you'll know you've arrived.