Does Muscle Soreness Mean You've Had a Better Workout?

Beyond the Reps | The Science

You know the feeling.

You've trained legs, and two days later you're lowering yourself onto the toilet like it's a controlled descent into hell.

Walking downstairs? An extreme sport.

And naturally, you think, Well, that must have been a bloody good workout.

But was it?

Somewhere along the way, we've started treating muscle soreness as proof that our training is working.

The sorer we are, the harder we must have trained. And if we wake up the next morning feeling perfectly fine, perhaps we didn't do enough.

Except muscle soreness isn't a reliable measure of how effective your workout was.

And understanding why might completely change how you judge your training.

What actually causes muscle soreness?

The soreness you experience after training is commonly referred to as delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS.

It typically develops in the hours following unfamiliar or demanding exercise, often peaking around 24–72 hours afterwards.

DOMS is associated with a combination of processes, including exercise-induced muscle damage, local inflammatory responses and changes in how sensitive the affected tissues are to pain.

It's particularly common when you introduce unfamiliar movements, increase training demands or perform exercises with a significant eccentric component.

That's the portion of a movement where the muscle produces force while lengthening, such as lowering yourself into a squat.

But here's where things get interesting.

Muscle damage and muscle growth are not the same thing.

More damage doesn't necessarily mean more growth.

Resistance training stimulates muscle adaptations through several interacting processes.

One of the most important for hypertrophy (muscle growth) is mechanical tension experienced by muscle fibres during sufficiently challenging contractions.

Training also stimulates muscle protein synthesis, the process through which the body builds new muscle proteins.

Over time, when muscle protein synthesis exceeds muscle protein breakdown sufficiently, and the right training and recovery conditions are present, muscle tissue can grow.

Muscle damage may occur alongside this process, particularly when training is unfamiliar.

But the presence of damage doesn't mean the growth stimulus was greater.

Research by Damas and colleagues (2016) found that early increases in muscle protein synthesis during a new resistance-training program were associated with muscle damage and repair. As training continued and damage decreased, the muscle protein synthesis response became more closely associated with actual hypertrophy.

In other words, some of that early repair activity wasn't necessarily building additional muscle.

It was helping recover from the damage.

Making yourself more sore isn't the same as giving your muscles a better reason to grow.

Why do you stop getting sore when you train consistently?

Ever noticed that a new exercise can leave you struggling to walk, but after a few weeks you can perform the same movement with little or no soreness?

That's partly explained by something called the repeated-bout effect.

As your body becomes accustomed to a particular training stimulus, it develops adaptations that reduce the muscle damage and soreness associated with subsequent exposures.

This is a good thing.

It means your body is becoming better equipped to tolerate the work you're asking it to perform.

It doesn't mean the exercise has suddenly stopped being effective.

In fact, reducing unnecessary muscle damage can allow you to train more consistently and maintain the quality of your subsequent sessions.

And consistency matters enormously when we're talking about results that take months and years to build.

So how should you measure a good workout?

Instead of asking whether you're sore, I'd much rather you ask whether your training is producing meaningful progress.

That might include:

• Increasing the load you can lift while maintaining appropriate technique.

• Completing more quality repetitions at a given weight.

• Improving movement execution, control and range of motion.

• Performing an appropriate amount of challenging training consistently.

• Seeing longer-term improvements in strength, muscular development or performance.

None of these requires you to spend the next three days walking sideways down the stairs.

And while soreness can sometimes provide useful information about how your body has responded to a session, it shouldn't be the primary measure of training quality.

Should you ever be concerned about soreness?

Some soreness is normal, especially when introducing new movements or returning to training after time away.

But deliberately chasing severe soreness isn't particularly productive.

If you're consistently so sore that your movement is restricted, your performance suffers or you're struggling to recover before your next session, it's worth reviewing your training demands.

More isn't automatically better.

And harder isn't always smarter.

Training needs to provide enough stimulus to encourage adaptation while still allowing you to recover and repeat that stimulus over time.

That's where good programming becomes important.

The takeaway

I've been training long enough to know that some of my most productive sessions haven't left me particularly sore.

And some of the sessions that absolutely destroyed me weren't necessarily the ones that contributed most to my long-term progress.

That's the distinction I want people to understand.

The goal of resistance training isn't to see how much soreness you can create. It's to provide a stimulus your body can adapt to, recover from and progressively build upon.

So the next time you finish a workout and wake up feeling surprisingly good?

Don't immediately assume you didn't do enough.

Your muscles don't need to punish you to prove they're growing.

Research reference

Damas, F., Phillips, S. M., Lixandrão, M. E., Vechin, F. C., Libardi, C. A., Roschel, H., Tricoli, V., & Ugrinowitsch, C. (2016). Resistance training-induced changes in integrated myofibrillar protein synthesis are related to hypertrophy only after attenuation of muscle damage. The Journal of Physiology, 594(18), 5209–5222.

https://doi.org/10.1113/JP272472

Kelly Greenslade | KG Performance

The science. The experience. The thinking behind the work.