They say experience is the best teacher. I’d like to officially dispute that claim.
After my first attempt to return to strength training ended in four days of upper-body agony, you would think I’d have approached my second workout with wisdom, caution, and a well-informed plan. And to be fair—I did approach it with caution. I chose lighter weights. I opted for a workout that sounded manageable. I even psyched myself up with a little pep talk: You’ve got this. Take it easy. Listen to your body.
As it turns out, my body had plenty to say. None of it kind.
This time, I queued up a 30-minute Apple Fitness+ total body strength workout, which sounds impressively comprehensive until you actually attempt it. When the impossibly chipper instructor smiled and said, “Go ahead and grab two medium-sized dumbbells,” I paused. Medium-sized is an extremely subjective term. In my prime, I would’ve reached for 15s or maybe even 20s for some movements. Today? I went for 8s. Eight-pound dumbbells. The kind of weights normally reserved for light warmups or people doing jazzercise in 1987.
I felt like I should’ve had to sign a waiver before selecting something so embarrassingly conservative. But after my upper-body was left for dead during round one, I wasn’t about to repeat the same mistake. My plan was simple: keep the weights light, move through the workout, and avoid another multi-day episode of complete muscular agony.
In one sense, my plan worked. My arms, chest, and shoulders came through just fine. No soreness. No stiffness. No breath-holding every time I reached for a coffee cup. I even allowed myself a small, smug moment of victory as I finished my rows, presses, and curls without incident.
And then we got to the squats.
Oh, the squats.
I don’t know what kind of dark place these trainers draw their programming from, but the combination of squats, side lunges, and glute bridges unleashed an entirely new kind of suffering I was not prepared for. My lower body, having spent months blissfully idle, was suddenly being asked to support, stabilize, and engage. My hamstrings voiced their concern immediately. My quads soon followed. By the second set of side lunges, my glutes started quietly filing HR complaints.
I finished the workout, of course, because I’m both stubborn and unwilling to let my iPad think less of me. But I knew—oh, I knew—what was coming.
The next morning, the soreness had arrived right on schedule. Not the sharp, seizing kind of pain that signals something’s gone terribly wrong. No, this was more insidious. This was the deep ache of muscles that have been rudely awakened from hibernation and are now texting each other angrily about how I could have let this happen.
By mid-morning, simple acts like sitting down required careful negotiation with gravity. Getting in and out of the car became a calculated maneuver, involving equal parts grimacing, hand support, and breath-holding. Stairs were not so much climbed as cautiously ascended with the grace of a baby giraffe learning to walk.
It was humbling.
But here’s where it got a little confusing: while my legs were completely trashed, my upper body remained perfectly fine. Not a hint of soreness. No tightness, no regret. My arms and chest, once the primary sites of my post-workout misery, were now innocent bystanders as my lower half spiraled into chaos.
If nothing else, at least my suffering was rotating through different regions.
By day two, I was in full-on leg lockdown. Sitting? A crime against nature. Standing? A reminder that youth is wasted on the young. Bending over to pick something up? A team-building exercise my muscles didn’t sign up for. The muscles behind my knees had apparently joined the rebellion, and my calves weren’t far behind. Even shifting positions in bed at night required advanced planning and creative use of momentum.
I couldn’t help but marvel at the absurdity of it. This wasn’t some grueling, multi-hour bootcamp led by a drill sergeant. This was a 30-minute, moderately-paced online workout led by a smiling instructor who kept calling me “athlete.” I wanted to believe her, but when you can’t sit on a toilet without gripping the towel rack for support, the word athlete feels… ambitious.
By the third day, things slowly began to improve. The soreness dulled. The spasms eased. I could finally sit down without audible whimpering. It was almost like my legs were negotiating a ceasefire. Not full forgiveness, but a willingness to move on.
I couldn’t help but notice the eerie symmetry: my upper body took about four days to recover after my first workout; my lower body gave me about three days of agony before loosening its grip. It was like my body was holding private auditions to see which half of me could embarrass me more.
The good news? I survived. The better news? I’m planning to do it again. Not because I enjoy the soreness (I absolutely do not), but because I know this is what reentry looks like. This is the price of starting over.
You see, when you’ve spent months away from training—months spent caregiving, months managing injury, months grieving—it’s easy to forget how quickly the body adapts to not doing anything. Muscles atrophy. Stability disappears. Balance falters. The systems that once quietly supported you every day suddenly need to be rebuilt from scratch.
And rebuilding hurts.
But here’s the thing I keep reminding myself: this kind of soreness means something is waking back up. These muscles didn’t tear. They weren’t damaged. They were simply reminded of their job. And after enough reminders, they’ll get better at it again.
I don’t know how long it will take to get back to “normal.” Honestly, I’m not even sure what normal is anymore. The version of me who once hammered out spin classes, lifted weights, and ran half marathons feels like a distant memory. But that version is still in here somewhere. She’s just buried under a few layers of scar tissue, both literal and metaphorical.
The process of unearthing her is not pretty. It involves breath-holding while sitting down, absurdly light dumbbells, and the occasional moment of wondering if this is delayed onset muscle soreness or just delayed onset mortality. But with each session, I get a tiny bit stronger. The soreness fades a little faster. The movements feel a little more familiar.
I know now that I’ll probably have to write several more of these humiliating blog posts before I feel anywhere near ready to tackle the kind of training required to bike across the United States. But for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m moving in the right direction.
Will there be more soreness? Absolutely. Will there be more days when I can barely sit on the toilet without using my arms for leverage? Probably. But eventually, I’ll string enough workouts together that my muscles stop treating every workout like an act of personal betrayal.
That’s the hope, anyway.
In the meantime, I’ll keep showing up, keep reaching for my embarrassingly light dumbbells, and keep pretending that each set of squats is getting a little easier.