muscle soreness

Did you do a series of stretches after 5 minutes to help warm up your muscles? You also also to do a series of proper stretches at the end. I've been going to the gym since September, always do my muscle stretches and haven't had any muscle soreness at all.

I remember reading a while ago that stretching does further unnecessary damage to your muscle fibres after an intense weight training session due to the fact that you are stretching out already freshly damaged muscle.

Can anyone shed some light onto this?

I would always stretch after a workout. The theory behind stretching is that the muscle gradually goes from pumped with a lot of blood running through it to it's normal state, rather than just "snapping" from hot to cold and from pumped to not.

Arnold was a big fan of stretching, incidentally. He believed that stretching at the end of a workout helped elongate the muscle and break down a few more cell walls and aid blood flow and growth. I'm not sure how much truth there is in that, but he often finished off a chest workout with a set of flyes, and Arnold's chest set the standard for the era. Take that for what you will.

So what do you think of Arnold's techniques?

I don't know a lot about his techniques, to be perfectly honest. I HATE the fact that he popularised split routines, because I think they're utter ass, but most people don't realise he got to the size he was using a full body routine and then switched to a split routine (still hitting each muscle twice a week, I believe) to chisel his specific shape.

I'm not sure about the stretching thing, I'm really not.

Whenever i train my legs it feels like someone has been pounding them with a meat tenderiser for a least a couple of days afterwards.