I am trying to figure this out for myself and there are a LOT of conflicting opinions in the weightlifting world! There is definitely a school of thought that says “lifting to exhaustion is not necessary”. I personally am of that school of thought at this point, for myself. It doesn’t make sense to me, honestly. My muscles get plenty challenged and sore without lifting to exhaustion! Though I am more interested in training for endurance, so I go for longer sets at lighter weights…

My sense is that you should not work out when you are quite sore. Muscles do need recovery time in order to be built up. I would say give yourself a break and go 2x a week for a few weeks and see if that works. I am doing a split schedule where I’m basically doing this, and it works out fine. I am sore, but I get about 3 days of rest before lifting again, and by that time I am mostly recovered.

I personally like the 12 second sequence. It uses the idea of lighter weights, but very slowly so that my muscles don’t get cheated by momentum. I only work out twice a week and I do need a good 2-3 days to recover, so that sounds normal to me. Couldn’t hurt to ask a professional though.

I’m not really comfortable with doing anything to exhaustion – it’s not very balanced! I think i’ll go back 5kg on all the machines, do them slower, and stop sooner. I’d rather go 3 times and feel energised the rest of the week – which was the point for me after all – than feel drained.

I’ll ask one of the gym instructors too, get their opinion.

It maybe that you don’t have enought protein in your diet for your body to repair your muscles with. I was having the same problem and the trainer told me to eat more protein rich foods and it seems to be helping!