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Anonymous
sup /fit/

Last week I started a new weightlifting routine. I'm 5'10", about 160 lbs. First a little background info...I was a fairly avid weightlifter about 4 years ago, stuck with it for a while before a move to another state and general laziness caused me to quit lifting regularly. I made pretty good gains considering how skinny I was back then.

Last week's workout went good, I hadn't lost a lot of strength considering how long of a break it was. For my first set of the day 1 week ago I did DB bench press, 8 reps, 30 lb each DB. Today I figured I'd bump the weight up to 32.5 a DB. I did my warm up, tried my first rep and couldn't even do 1! I lowered the weight to 30 lb and was only able to do 1 rep, and it was a struggle.

All the time I've been lifting 95% of the time I was able to at least do more weight/reps than the week before, and when there was a dropoff it wasn't nearly as dramatic as today's was. Even when I first started lifting I could still make solid gains from week 1 to 2.

So WTF could have caused this? I'm not under any stress or anything, I'm not sick, I've been sleeping at least 8 hours every night...any ideas?

in b4 squatz
>> Anonymous
since you took such a long break i'm guessing your muscles are sore as hell after that first workout, so give them some more time to recover.
>> Anonymous
totally... it's called conditioning. Your muscle is probably still mostly there but your body isn't conditioned for abuse right now.

The good news is that "good condition" can be regained in a few short weeks instead of muscle which takes months and years (without anabolic assistance).

Just keep up on it and don't over-work yourself until you're fully back "into condition". if you do it right I wouldn't be surprised to see you lifting as much weight as you did before at your peak in 4-8 weeks and then progressing beyond that point after that.