Does Muscle Soreness Mean a Good Workout? DOMS Explained

Does muscle soreness mean a good workout? What the research says

Soreness does not track muscle damage well. A 2002 study by Nosaka, Newton and Sacco in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports measured soreness alongside other markers after eccentric exercise. Its title sums up the finding: "Delayed-onset muscle soreness does not reflect the magnitude of eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage."

Soreness is not the same as growth. In a 2013 review in the Strength and Conditioning Journal, Schoenfeld and Contreras pointed out that soreness correlates poorly with markers of muscle damage, varies a lot from person to person, and also follows endurance events such as marathon running that build little muscle. They concluded that soreness "should not be used as a definitive gauge of results".

Muscle can grow without measurable damage. In a 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Flann and colleagues had one group ease into hard eccentric cycling over three weeks, so their muscles showed no measurable damage, while another group started with a damaging session. Both then trained for eight weeks. The group that started with damage reported more soreness and had more than five times the blood levels of creatine kinase, a marker of muscle damage, yet both groups gained the same muscle size, and strength rose by about a quarter in each.

Early on, damage gets in the way. In a 2016 study in The Journal of Physiology, Damas and colleagues took muscle samples from 10 young men across 10 weeks of resistance training. Damage was highest in the first week and much lower by week three. The muscle-building response in that first week was not linked to how much each man eventually grew; from week three on, as damage faded, it was closely linked. The authors concluded that growth builds up as damage declines.

The practical point: being very sore is not a bonus. Some soreness after a new program is normal, but chasing it means spending recovery on repair rather than growth.

Why you stop getting sore

Most lifters notice that a new program leaves them sore for the first week or two, then hardly at all. This is called the repeated bout effect: after one session of an exercise, the next similar session causes less damage and less soreness. Schoenfeld and Contreras note that this is why regular training can bring little soreness and still produce substantial muscle growth.

So if you are not sore any more, your muscles have adapted to the exercise. They have not stopped responding to it. To know whether you are still progressing, look at your training log, not your aches.

Better signs of a good workout

• Your working sets are hard. Most end about 1 to 3 reps short of failure. Training to failure explains how to judge that.
• Your weights or reps creep up over the weeks on the same exercises. Progressive overload shows a simple way to make that happen.
• Your weekly volume is enough: roughly 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle a week works for most people.
• You recover in time. You arrive at the next session for that muscle able to match or beat what you did last time.
• Your measurements and photos change over months, not days.

Should you train when you are sore?

There is little direct research on this, so these are common coaching rules rather than tested ones:

• Mildly sore: warm up well and train as planned. Mild soreness usually eases once you get moving.
• Very sore, and it changes how you move: train a different muscle that day, or do the planned session lighter.
• Still sore every time you come back to the same muscle, week after week, while your performance slips: you may be doing more than you can recover from. Cut a few sets, or take a deload week.

Starting a new program? Ease in. Do fewer sets than planned for the first week or two, stop further from failure, and build up. It is the same idea as the group in the Flann study that avoided damage and grew just as much.

What helps with soreness

Time is the main cure. A 2018 systematic review and meta-analysis by Dupuy and colleagues in Frontiers in Physiology pooled 107 studies of recovery methods. Massage was the most effective for reducing soreness and the feeling of fatigue. Active recovery (light movement), compression garments, water immersion, contrast water therapy and cryotherapy also gave small to large reductions in soreness, while other methods made no difference.

Those methods help you feel better; the review did not look at whether they change muscle growth. Beyond that, the everyday basics still apply: sleep well, and eat enough food and protein for your goal.

When soreness is not normal

Normal DOMS is a dull ache in the muscles you trained, which eases over a few days. Some things are not normal:

• Severe muscle pain, marked swelling, weakness, or dark red or brown urine after hard exercise. These can be signs of rhabdomyolysis, a serious condition in which damaged muscle releases its contents into the blood and can harm the kidneys. Healthdirect, the Australian government's health information service, advises getting medical attention urgently, and warns that symptoms may not start until hours or days later. The ACSM also advises seeing a doctor for debilitating pain, heavily swollen limbs or dark urine.
• Sharp, sudden pain during a lift, or pain in a joint rather than the muscle. That sounds more like an injury than soreness. Stop the exercise that causes it and speak to your doctor or a physiotherapist.

Where coaching helps

The hard part is judging your training on the right evidence: how sore you feel is a poor measure, and your log is a much better one. With one-to-one coaching from CoachAk, your training program sits in a private app, and you log every workout in a training log that tracks your personal bests and carries your coach's comments. Each weekly check-in takes about three minutes and covers your training, sleep, energy and stress as well as your weight, and your coach replies with written feedback and adjusts your program when your log says you need more, or less. You can also send form-check videos for your coach to reply to, and message between check-ins, though for pain or an injury your doctor or physiotherapist comes first.

If you want your progress judged on your log rather than your aches, apply for coaching.