Re:
If I'm sore, i don't lift. Period. End of story. I do something else. Golf, if I can even swing. Walk the boulevard near my apartment. Play flag football. I just won't lift. Lifting is the most strenuous activity, taxing not only the muscle, but the recuperative abilities of your body. IMO, and also from medical journals and lifting pro's not on the juice, when you're sore, lifting only stops recovery of THOSE muscles you just lifted with to focus on the ones you're doing now.
So instead of 100% focused recovery on say, the legs and lower back, now you get 50% recovery ability focused throughout, prolonging your recovery period, until you lift again, when you're likely not to have recovered. And what is recovery? It's the healing and building of new muscle. On the surface, people think it's magically built in a week, but in reality it takes months, even years to gain that much. After a week, you might have a few new ounces, but our expectations are so high because we see genetic freaks or juicers walking around and automatically assume everyone can do it. In reality 90% of the population is average, and they mistake their weight gain or weight loss for fat or muscle when it's really just fluctuations due to energy demands and loss or gain of water.
For the average person, the ratio of fat to muscle gained is 3:1. Or 75% fat, 25% muscle. If you're bulking, most will gain fat or water, that's why overdoing it does give you a quicker gain and fuller muscles, but you're not gaing 20lbs of muscle, more like 5-8, and the rest is water and fat. And that's normal.
A much more LONG-term approach to lifting would yield better bodies across the nation, and better expectations. My feeling is, if most guys dedicated themselves to activity, to lifting heavy with big weights and eating right, in a year, they'd be amazed at what they accomplished. Along the way they'd learn what works for them and their genetics, and perhaps you find out you can lift and recover faster than normal people. That'd be great. I can't. I stay sore from squats for 3 days after. I did them Monday, and last Night I was able to sprint. Before that I couldn't walk. I wouldn't do chest, because I can feel the fatigue in my body, good fatigue though.
You'd breakdown training into a few categories..
1) Type of lifting...i.e. compound lifts versus supplemental lifts
2) Frequency of training
3) Nutrition
The first place I'd look to lack of progress is Nutrition. Once that is in check, your frequency comes next. Too frequent, you're not allowing time for growth recovery. Too infrequenct, you're not compounding your gains. Last, what you do. You have to push yourself each week. That's the bottom line of fitness, bettering your body each time you go out. It's purely mental. Any reasonable program will allow for body changes, it just matters what changes you WANT. Lifting 45 minutes, even if it was bar and dumbbells would cause you to preserve muscle and lose fat. If you wanted the best gains possible, then doing compound big lifts is ideal. They're efficient, it's the best way to lift the most weight for each muscle, and they tax you the greatest to generate the largest hormonal response possible.
A-Unit
