Does soreness mean you had a great workout?
A lot of people equate the effectiveness of their session with how sore they are walking out.
Other lifters look to get out of breath, but aren't into hobbling down the stairs to their car.
Regardless, it's hard not to connect your sore muscles to whether or not you had a good workout the day before.
Can your training session really be effective if you’re not sore?
It’s actually amazing how little we know about delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS):
- We know that that it is related to muscle damage.
- We know that it seems to be a byproduct of inflammation caused by connective tissue tears.
- We know that it can be exacerbated by swelling.
- We know that it is most likely heightened when doing eccentric training or including novel movements in your program.
So, we do know some things, but it seems crazy that many lifters use soreness as the primary feedback for training effectiveness considering the limited evidence we have about it.
This seems especially crazy when you consider the connection between DOMS and muscle damage. Why? Because…
- We know that severe muscle damage impairs force production and what you can get out of future training sessions.
- We know that training during the early parts of the recovery phase from muscle damage interferes with your body’s capacity to rebuild.
All of this is suggestive that if you damage your muscles too much, you’ll probably be super sore and need to take time away from training to recovery properly. This isn’t a small amount of time either. Some research indicates that regeneration of muscle tissue in those with severe muscle damage can take as long as 3 weeks.
3 weeks!?!?!?
That doesn’t mean you’re walking around sore from a single workout for 3 weeks. It means you were likely super sore from a thrashing, and now your force production will be compromised for as much as 3 weeks, diminishing what you can get out of your training over that entire period. That’s a major impediment to progress right there.
So, is soreness bad?
No. Since there is a connection between muscle damage and soreness, and muscle damage is a big part of the intention behind lifting weights, it makes sense that you’re sore from an effective training session.
What should be avoided is the “more is better” mentality. Being sorer doesn’t mean you had a better workout. It’s all about striking a balance between training too little and going too hard. And that balance point is different for each person.
Now, do yourself a favor. Don't ruin your next 3 weeks training by destroying your muscles. And drink some protein for God's sake.
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