Many strength athletes see muscle soreness as a sign of an effective workout. But is muscle pain indeed an indicator of a good training and therefore also of muscle growth?
WHAT IS MUSCLE PAIN?
In this article, by muscle soreness we mean delayed onset muscle soreness, also referred to as DOMS. It usually occurs 24 hours after exercise and can last up to seven days. This is in contrast to acute muscle soreness, which already presents itself during training.
DOMS is caused by the hard pulling of muscle fibers together, which is necessary to provide force when contracting the muscle (muscle contraction). This causes muscle tears. In the days after the effort, the body goes to work to repair those tears. This causes a small inflammatory reaction in the muscle. That’s what you feel like DOMS. DOMS is greatest 24 to 72 hours after exercise.
NO PAIN, NO GAIN?
Many gym goers think that having DOMS means that you have trained well and that muscle growth is occurring. No pain, no gain. But that’s not true for several reasons:
- You could argue that DOMS is an indicator of muscle damage. But it is probably not a reliable indicator. After all, the inflammation that arises stimulates pain receptors outside the muscle fibers. Whether you get DOMS partly depends on the sensitivity of these pain receptors. As a result, one person experiences much more or more often DOMS than another. All this apart from the fact that muscle damage is not a condition for muscle growth.
- Muscle soreness is usually worst at the beginning of the training cycle, especially with new movements, but visible and increased growth usually occurs towards the end of the cycle, when muscle soreness no longer occurs. DOMS therefore decreases as more adaptation has taken place.
- Some muscles, such as the shoulders and calves, rarely cause DOMS, but they grow just fine. So DOMS is not required.
- People who train little, like every muscle group only once a week, often suffer from DOMS. But many of them don’t grow well. People who train more often (so 2-3 times a week per muscle group) always report less DOMS but more growth.
- Some activities that cause severe DOMS do not cause muscle growth. For example, running long distances.
In addition, having DOMS can cause these effects: studies show that training a muscle while it is still sore, can reduce activation of the desired muscle, the strength capacity of the muscle may decrease to 50% and the recovery process can disrupt.
If you have really bad DOMS, that is probably a sign that you have unnecessarily caused many small muscle tears during your training. All these muscle tears must be repaired; it therefore takes much longer before the muscle is recovered and can be trained again.
Viewed in this way, DOMS says little about the quality of the training and the extent to which muscle growth takes place. Having a bit of muscle soreness is okay, but if you often have massive muscle soreness, it probably means that your training is unnecessarily intense and/or voluminous, and therefore leads to overreaching (the preliminary stage of overtraining) rather than gains.
PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD
It therefore makes no sense to aim for as much DOMS as possible during your workouts. What you should strive for is progressive overload: gradually being able to train with more weight and repetitions. The fact that you can train harder means that muscle growth has occurred, regardless of the amount of muscle soreness you had.
So instead of training so hard that you have severe DOMS, it is better to train a little less intensively or for a long time several times a week.
CONCLUSION
There are many factors that determine the degree of DOMS, including pain receptors and adaptation, and these can vary greatly from person to person. Having muscle soreness does not automatically mean that muscle growth has taken place; a lot of DOMS even seems to have a negative influence on muscle growth.
A little muscle soreness is okay, but don’t aim for DOMS but for overload during your training: progressive overload is the key to muscle growth.