Soreness: should you work out?

On Wednesday I was still pretty sore from Monday. It was the type of soreness where merely pressing the area hurt. Still I knew that if I kept waiting for the soreness to go down I'd never improve, so how do you walk that fine line of training vs overtraining.

Well, the standard seems to be if you're still sore after the warm up, you should still rest. After the warm up on Wednesday, I didn't feel sore, so I decided to go for it, albeit at a scaled down version:

5 rounds for time
400m sprint
30 abmat situps w/ 15# medball
10 pullups (Rx'd was 20)

My time was pretty slow, but back to what I want to talk about: soreness. It seems that when you're getting back into the swing of things it's ok to workout if you're sore, but after a while one should avoid forgetting recovery for the sake of activity. After all, working out breaks your body down, and you only get stronger after you recover.

In terms of treating soreness, there are many different areas to focus on, as is pointed out in a great discussion on the crossfit board about soreness:

1. Nutrition - We know that going on the Zone, Paleo, or whatever suits your training often results in a performance skyrocket.
2. Sleep - Critical. Not enough quickly sends performance down the toilet. Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters sleep 9 hrs/night plus a 3 hour nap between training sessions according to Dan John.
3. Active Recovery - Easy, fun, physical activity. Non-strenous to your level of conditioning. Biking, swimming, rock climbing, whatever.
4. Social Time - Hanging with friends/family/significant other. Having fun. (So does 4 hours in the mall count as relaxing..?)
5. Alone Time - Prayer, meditation, thought gathering, journaling.
6. Cryotherapy/Contrast Bath/Contrast Shower - a nice tingly way to ease soreness and improve recovery. Featured in the Performance Menu.

I think working out on Wednesday was a good thing, but if I'm ever this sore after like the fifth week of xfit, I'll be taking the day off.