Starting a weightlifting journey can be exciting but requires attention to key fundamentals. Soreness after workouts is normal, especially with delayed onset muscle soreness, which typically occurs 1–2 days later. However, prolonged soreness may indicate issues with recovery, such as hormonal imbalances or inadequate sleep, hydration, or nutrition. Incorporating massage, stretching, and proper hydration can aid recovery, ensuring a smoother fitness journey.

Perfect form is crucial for long-term success and injury prevention. Beginners are encouraged to work with a trainer to master proper techniques, prioritize full range of motion, and address muscle imbalances. By focusing on movement quality over heavy weights, individuals can build a solid foundation, improve strength symmetry, and enhance overall functionality.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:04 – Starting to Lift: Embrace Soreness

01:15 – Recovery Tips for Soreness

02:37 – Importance of Perfect Form

04:05 – Squat Techniques and Full Range of Motion

05:21 – Developing Symmetry and Strength

07:48 – Addressing Muscle Imbalances

09:06 – Hormonal Influence on Recovery

10:14 – Prioritizing Form Over Weight

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] So those of you who are starting to exercise, starting to lift. If you get sore. Good job. That was the goal. If you get so sore, you can’t move. Maybe a little bit too much. The nice thing about getting sores that it tells us that the muscles are got activity. They got worked. They got they were doing something new. They were asked, Susan. They aren’t normally asked to do. And they got broken down. And in the process, they’re going to heal and regenerate. Now, here’s the thing. If you work out today and you’re not sort of the next day, but you saw two days later, it’s called Doms, it’s delayed onset muscle soreness, completely normal. You’re not broken. Don’t worry about it. If you’re I guess a lot of people wake up the next day like, I’m not that sore. This is awesome. I’m in better shape than I thought I was. And the next day they can’t move. So don’t worry about that. That’s you. That that’s the thing that’s going to happen. Now, here’s the thing. The time it takes for you to get not sore, right? So if let’s say you did like a pretty good chest workout on Monday and your chest is sore for a week. You probably are not regenerating and healing properly. Get your hormones tested. Look at your diet. Look at your supplementation. You’re taking a look at your sleep.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:15] You know those things are going to be great. Look at your water intake. That’s gonna be one of those things you guys have started to check out. If you guys are, you know, overly sore. Massage is fantastic for this. Like I talked about yesterday, getting and getting adjusted to may be beneficial to Americans to me helpful and again water. But here’s the thing. When you’re starting to lift this is super duper important. This is why, you know, this is one of those places where you really need a trainer on site with you. Watching you individually is the best group is okay, but individually is the best. You know, go ahead and spend the money. It’s be worth it. What you want to do is you want to make sure that as you’re starting to to work out, you have somebody making sure your form is perfect. Not good, not okay, Perfect. And the reason for that is because whenever that person walks away, your form is to go from wherever it is down a notch or two. So if they’re really, really picky and you’re a ten and you kind of get used to the ten when they walk away, you’ll be lifting it about an eight. If they’re just kind of whatever, you know, and you started a 7 or 8, whenever they walk away, you can be at a five. The reason that this is so picky and so important, this is the one place you have to really, really focus is that when we start talking about forming or lifting, that is entirely the whole thing. That is where your strength comes from. That’s where your flexibility, your functionality and your safety comes from.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:37] So if you’re lifting in a manner that is not good for the joint, you’re going to damage the joint. If you’re not lifting with a full range of motion, then you’re going to grow muscle tissue in an inappropriate length. So for instance, and I may say these things to make add something stop. Start with this when you’re teaching somebody to do squats. There’s two ways of doing it. There’s Olympic style and there’s functional style. These neither one of these is right or wrong. It depends on why you’re doing it. So if you’re going to be doing squats for contests, if you’re going to do squats because you know that’s how you’ve always done Olympic squat, that’s fine. An Olympic squat is where you go parallel. So your femur and your knee are kind of stuff like this. Your femur or the middle of your leg is parallel with the ground and that’s where you stop and then you go back up. Okay, that is an Olympic lift as we had to point to point of where we all going down to, we said parallel. And so as soon as you get to parallel, then you can stand back up and it’s an official lift and it counts the whole deal. So a lot of people are top parallel and that’s fine. I prefer what we call ass to grass, which is as low as you can possibly go because you want that entirety of the full range of motion. Now, here’s the here’s the issue that I think here’s the thing you pick up with doing full range that you miss sometimes is doing parallel. If you slip, if you fall, if you’re sitting in a lower position. So instead of being here, your fingers feel like this, you’re squatting down.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:05] Think about sitting on a floor, sitting in a child’s chair, sitting in a couch that’s just a little bit too low. There’s all sorts of things that we see this with, and you go to stand up, you’re not going to necessarily have the power, the coordination, the flexibility to function from a less than less than parallel standpoint to get up. You know, if you’re squatting 500 pounds in a parallel force and you weigh 200 pounds, you’re probably going to be able to stand up from a pretty low position. However, if you’re just squatting, bodyweight, that type of thing, I would recommend that you train a little bit lower. Work with your trainer, ask about it. They’ll be able to hook you up, go all the way down. And so people talk about, well, it’s bad for the knees. It’s not bad for the knees. Trade anywhere. You train the knees the way you want to do it. So typically, if we’re talking about knee function, well, how people do is start off with full range of motion all the way up and down, double leg. And then when they get strong enough from that, they will get a single leg function. This they can do all the way up and down with that individual leg. Then we’ll start having the Negro over the toe and we’ll have start having we’ll start destabilizing the ankle so that we build up ankle stability, support and coordination. So, you know, it’s a step progress. But if you’re going to start with these other things, start with your full range of motion.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:21] Talk to your trainer. Talk to whoever may be like, hey, you know, help me get the full range of motion and help me move my form. Perfect. Where my shoulders are, where my hips are or my knees are everything. Have them tell you what to watch for. So if you’re doing squats and your knees are doing this type of thing, your knees are pitching in or they’re pitching out, you know, that’s a problem. That’s muscle weakness. You need to start training for that and kind of, you know, fixing that, especially if you’re a woman. Squats are phenomenal for women. Leg, you know, if you want the nice round, but if you want the, you know, the nice thighs and that’s a big thing. And the great calves squats are going to be kind of a must for you guys. The lower you go, the better are going to be, the more stabilize you get that knee to say, the better it’s going to be for your whole lower extremity. I’m sorry, Your hip, your knee. The whole. All leg. So the hip, the D in the ankle. So kind of tracking through that single leg step ups are one of my favorite things to get to. I have a right to do those have my pro athletes. I have, you know, soccer moms. I have. That’s how everybody trains. I train everybody individual legs because I want your left leg to be just as strong as your right leg. I want the neurologic tone, which is how tight the hamstrings are to be, even because that’s really big on pelvic function, balance, coordination, that whole thing.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:37] I see lots and lots of people who have low back pain and will adjust when they feel great. And then couple days later that hurt again because one hamstring is tighter than the other one. And so usually I’ll walk that patient through how to fix that. But that is that is something we see all the time. So making sure that you’re doing everything equally on both legs is really important. So, for instance, let’s say that you’re going to be doing single leg, leg press or single leg extension like curl, single leg step ups. We’re going to your individual legs. And let’s say that you can do on one leg. You can do Obviously, these numbers are going to be varied, bridging the 50 pounds and the left leg. You can only be 40 pounds in the right leg. My recommendation to you is to do only 40 pounds on both legs until you get the weaker leg as strong as the strongest leg. And the reason for that. So if you’re like, I can do 12 like single leg bodyweight, for instance, I can do 12 reps on my left side, but I can only do eight. Am I right? Do eight on both and then push that one the weak one harder so that you can get them back up. So you can do 12 on both because you want both power and how tight it is. The tone where we want to say to be even is that that’s going to give you balance, functionality and stuff like that.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:48] So think of it this way If one is tighter or stronger than the other one, what ends up happening is it’s like a car with the back right wheel spinning at a hundred miles an hour on the back left wheels turning at 50 miles an hour. You’re going to be constantly turning yourself in circles. That can be really, really bad for low back issues, Hip issues as issues. Knee issues, soreness in the legs and in the pelvis regions of ilium. So as that groin muscles, you’re going to start seeing that over and over again. You’re going to have to get that adjusted. You have to put the pelvis back together and then you’re gonna have to start working on. Muscular style pelvic stability function, which is pretty easy. I should be able to do that all the time. If you already go to the gym, it’s easy peasy. It’s just like, Hey, do this one a little bit more. Do this from this angle and you’re fine. It’s not some it’s super difficult to direct, to rectify. But when you’re starting off, like I said, you’re going to be sore. That’s good. Means you did it right. If you feel like you’re sore long and you’re supposed to, which is, you know, if you’re sore for 3 or 4 days and it’s, you know, a little bit sore, a lot of sore less or less or pretty good, then you’re you’re kind of there. You know, you can get your hormones checked if you want to, but if you’re sore for like 3 or 4 days, if you workout on Monday and you’re still sore on Saturday, get your hormones checked, specifically testosterone, you’re not healing and regenerating fast enough.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:06] There’s other things we can do. Like I said, you know, hyperbaric chamber, my favorite, you know, more water stretching, you know, massage massage is fantastic. So getting adjusted helps a little bit on that 1 to 2. Mark is a good one. So there’s a whole list of things that we can put together for being extra sore. But the first thing you really want to check is where are your hormones, right? Specifically testosterone, women to especially women, you guys need testosterone as well. So kind of start there. If you guys are starting to figure out what do you want to do, what’s the most important thing to focus on? It’s definitely not wait, do not wait Is wait is the last thing you want to start working with. So usually what we’ll do is we’ll do times my fair of things to work with. So instead of going and wait, we slow down how you’re doing it, we increase the amount of times you’re doing it. We decrease the amount of times between the sets, like time is the best way to manipulate these things. Because when you start adding weight, you start adding risk for injury and nobody wants injury because it’s going to reduce the amount of time you’re in the gym. If you’re just starting, it’s the worst thing in the world for you because it’s a really real big, really powerful mood. Motivation Killer.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:14] So, so those are the type of things to kind of start with, kind of keep in mind, you know, have your trainer, have your coach, however, who’s putting your workout plan together, whoever’s watching you really, really work on that form. Make sure that you have the form down and then, you know, kind of build it from there. So that’s going to your base is like, how well do you do the exercise, you know, irrelevant of weights, Like take all the weight out, take all the, you know, speed out, take everything else out, and just like, are you moving perfectly? That’s the primary thing. Figure out are you moving perfectly? And so as you start moving perfectly, then we can start resisting it more and adding more weight on. But get that that form perfect first. So yes, everything else is questions at Chalmers Wellness.com or leave a comment. Thanks for your time. Have a nice day.

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Dr. Matt Chalmers

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