Training article
Aches, Pain, And When To Stop
Soreness after something new is normal. Some pain is a reason to stop
General information about training and eating, not personal advice. It is not medical or dietary advice and it cannot account for your circumstances. If you are pregnant, have a medical condition, take medication, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to a GP or a registered dietitian before changing how you eat or train.
The safety line in this app ends the same way wherever it appears: stop if something hurts rather than aches. That sentence assumes you can tell the two apart, and when you are new to lifting it is not obvious. This is the difference, as plainly as we can put it.
What normal feels like. Muscles you have not trained in a while, or trained in a new way, are often stiff and tender afterwards — usually worst a day or two after the session and gone within the week, which is how NHS physiotherapy guidance describes it too. It is a dull, spread-out ache in the muscle, it eases as you warm up, and it is on both sides if you trained both sides. Being sore is not proof the session was good, and not being sore is not proof it was bad; mostly it means the work was new.
Stop that exercise, and leave it for the day, if you feel
- Sharp or sudden pain, especially in or around a joint, rather than a burn in the muscle.
- Pain in one spot, on one side, that gets worse with each rep instead of easing as you warm up.
- Swelling or redness that was not there before, a pop or a click that comes with pain, or a joint that gives way.
- Numbness, tingling or pins and needles, or pain that runs down an arm or a leg.
- Pain that changes how you move: you are shifting your weight or cutting the range short to get the rep.
Stop the session altogether for these, because they are not training problems. Chest pain or pressure, feeling dizzy or faint, breathlessness that stops you talking, or a heartbeat that is racing or irregular. The NHS says to call 999 for chest pain that comes on suddenly and does not go away, spreads to your arms, neck, jaw, back or stomach, or comes with sweating, feeling sick, dizziness or breathlessness. For anything else that worries you and cannot wait, NHS 111 will tell you where to go.
After you stop. A pain that has not settled within a few days, or that comes back every time you do the same lift, needs a GP or a physiotherapist to look at it. A website cannot, and we are not going to guess. In many parts of the UK you can refer yourself to NHS physiotherapy without seeing a GP first.
Train around it, not through it. A sore knee does not have to mean no training, but it does mean not doing the thing that hurts it. On the Log, Swap for today puts a different lift from the same group in its place for that session without changing your programme; use it, and leave the lift that hurts until it has been looked at. Pushing through pain to keep a run going is exactly the trade this app is built not to ask for: there is no training streak here to protect.
None of this is medical advice, and it cannot account for an injury you already have or a condition you live with. If you are training around either, get it looked at before you load it.