- Aug 15, 2018
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# Muscle Soreness (DOMS): Does Being Sore Mean the Workout Worked?
We've all heard some version of it in the gym: “If you're not sore tomorrow, did you even train?” It's an easy way to judge a session because soreness is noticeable. Progress is usually slower and harder to see. But those two things aren't interchangeable, and I think it's worth having a proper discussion about the difference.
**The short answer from exercise research is no: soreness is not a reliable scorecard for whether a workout produced a useful training adaptation.** It can tell us that an exercise was unfamiliar or physically demanding in a particular way. It cannot, by itself, tell us how much muscle someone built, whether strength increased, or whether the session was well designed.
Delayed-onset muscle soreness, usually shortened to DOMS, is the discomfort that develops after exercise rather than necessarily during it. It is often especially noticeable after unfamiliar movements or a lot of eccentric work, where a muscle produces force as it lengthens. Think of the lowering phase of a lift. That's a description of the contraction, not a claim that every lowering repetition must make someone sore.
The classic review by Cheung, Hume and Maxwell, published in *Sports Medicine* in 2003, described several competing explanations for DOMS, including muscle and connective-tissue disturbance, inflammatory processes and other responses. One thing that history shows is that the popular “lactic acid sitting in the muscle for days” explanation does not hold up as a complete account. Soreness is a complex response, not a direct measurement of a single substance.
**Here's where the soreness-as-progress idea runs into trouble.** Training changes the body's response to familiar work. A movement that left someone struggling to sit down after the first exposure may produce much less soreness after repeated exposures, even while that person continues training and improving. If soreness were the definition of effectiveness, getting accustomed to an exercise would somehow mean it stopped working.
Researchers call one part of this the *repeated-bout effect*. Nosaka, Clarkson, McGuiggin and Byrne studied adaptation after high-force eccentric exercise in work published in 1991. Related experiments showed that a prior bout can change the response to a later similar bout, including markers associated with muscle disturbance and soreness. The interesting feature is the adaptation itself: a familiar challenge can provoke less disruption the next time.
That matters because a forum full of experienced lifters is likely to include people who rarely get the same intense soreness they remember from their first months. It would be a strange conclusion to say those people have stopped making progress solely because walking down stairs feels normal again.
Of course, the opposite mistake is possible too. A workout that leaves someone sore is not automatically bad. DOMS is a real experience, and soreness after unfamiliar work is widely documented. The issue is what we infer from it. “I felt that session later” is a valid observation. “Therefore I stimulated more growth than last week” is a separate claim requiring different evidence.
There's also an important measurement problem. Soreness is often rated by the person experiencing it. Perception can vary with the muscle tested, the movement used to assess tenderness, and the time since the session. Strength, muscle size and training performance are measured in other ways. A soreness score is not a substitute for those outcomes simply because it is easier to notice.
The muscle-growth literature gives another reason to be careful. Damas and colleagues' 2018 review in the *European Journal of Applied Physiology* examined how muscle damage and muscle protein synthesis relate to hypertrophy across resistance training. Their argument was that some early muscle-protein-synthesis activity after unfamiliar training may reflect repair and remodelling, rather than predicting the amount of growth seen over weeks of training. That is a much more nuanced picture than “more damage equals more muscle.”
A separate study titled *The Time Course of Short-Term Hypertrophy in the Absence of Eccentric Muscle Damage*, published in 2017, reported small detectable increases in muscle size during an early training period without corresponding significant changes in its selected soreness and damage indicators. That does not settle every debate about hypertrophy mechanisms, but it is difficult to square with the claim that noticeable soreness is mandatory for any growth.
Another wrinkle: even visible short-term changes in muscle size need interpretation. After unfamiliar exercise, swelling and fluid shifts can affect measurements. Researchers have to distinguish an early change in tissue size from sustained increases in contractile muscle. That's one reason a single post-workout sensation or short-term measurement doesn't tell the whole story.
I also think it's useful to separate **soreness, fatigue and actual performance** when we talk about the next session. They can overlap, but they aren't identical. A person might feel tender yet produce similar force on a test, or feel fine while performance is lower for reasons unrelated to DOMS. A study has to measure the outcome it claims to explain.
So what does “the workout worked” even mean? For one person it might mean a strength adaptation over a training block. For another it might mean better movement familiarity or endurance in a repeated task. Those are outcomes evaluated across time, not proven by how tender a muscle feels on one morning. The answer changes with the goal and with how that goal is measured.
None of this is an invitation to ignore severe or unusual pain. DOMS is the research topic here, not a label we should automatically attach to every painful sensation. A forum conversation can't determine what an individual's pain represents. We can keep the discussion focused on how training studies define and measure soreness without making personal diagnoses.
My take: soreness is one piece of information about the experience of training, especially novelty. It is a poor stand-in for progress. The repeated-bout effect is actually a good example of adaptation showing up as **less** soreness, not more. The useful question isn't whether a session hurt afterwards; it's whether the evidence we care about matches the training outcome being claimed.
Let's hear how this has played out for the experienced people here, especially those who've trained the same movements for years. I'm interested in observations, but also in how we avoid mistaking an interesting personal pattern for proof of cause and effect.
1. Have you had a training block with little soreness but clear progress in strength or another measured outcome?
2. When someone calls soreness proof of muscle growth, what distinction between DOMS, muscle damage and adaptation do you think gets missed most often?
3. Which measures over several weeks do you find most persuasive when discussing whether training was productive, and why?
— OLYMPIC
We've all heard some version of it in the gym: “If you're not sore tomorrow, did you even train?” It's an easy way to judge a session because soreness is noticeable. Progress is usually slower and harder to see. But those two things aren't interchangeable, and I think it's worth having a proper discussion about the difference.
**The short answer from exercise research is no: soreness is not a reliable scorecard for whether a workout produced a useful training adaptation.** It can tell us that an exercise was unfamiliar or physically demanding in a particular way. It cannot, by itself, tell us how much muscle someone built, whether strength increased, or whether the session was well designed.
Delayed-onset muscle soreness, usually shortened to DOMS, is the discomfort that develops after exercise rather than necessarily during it. It is often especially noticeable after unfamiliar movements or a lot of eccentric work, where a muscle produces force as it lengthens. Think of the lowering phase of a lift. That's a description of the contraction, not a claim that every lowering repetition must make someone sore.
The classic review by Cheung, Hume and Maxwell, published in *Sports Medicine* in 2003, described several competing explanations for DOMS, including muscle and connective-tissue disturbance, inflammatory processes and other responses. One thing that history shows is that the popular “lactic acid sitting in the muscle for days” explanation does not hold up as a complete account. Soreness is a complex response, not a direct measurement of a single substance.
**Here's where the soreness-as-progress idea runs into trouble.** Training changes the body's response to familiar work. A movement that left someone struggling to sit down after the first exposure may produce much less soreness after repeated exposures, even while that person continues training and improving. If soreness were the definition of effectiveness, getting accustomed to an exercise would somehow mean it stopped working.
Researchers call one part of this the *repeated-bout effect*. Nosaka, Clarkson, McGuiggin and Byrne studied adaptation after high-force eccentric exercise in work published in 1991. Related experiments showed that a prior bout can change the response to a later similar bout, including markers associated with muscle disturbance and soreness. The interesting feature is the adaptation itself: a familiar challenge can provoke less disruption the next time.
That matters because a forum full of experienced lifters is likely to include people who rarely get the same intense soreness they remember from their first months. It would be a strange conclusion to say those people have stopped making progress solely because walking down stairs feels normal again.
Of course, the opposite mistake is possible too. A workout that leaves someone sore is not automatically bad. DOMS is a real experience, and soreness after unfamiliar work is widely documented. The issue is what we infer from it. “I felt that session later” is a valid observation. “Therefore I stimulated more growth than last week” is a separate claim requiring different evidence.
There's also an important measurement problem. Soreness is often rated by the person experiencing it. Perception can vary with the muscle tested, the movement used to assess tenderness, and the time since the session. Strength, muscle size and training performance are measured in other ways. A soreness score is not a substitute for those outcomes simply because it is easier to notice.
The muscle-growth literature gives another reason to be careful. Damas and colleagues' 2018 review in the *European Journal of Applied Physiology* examined how muscle damage and muscle protein synthesis relate to hypertrophy across resistance training. Their argument was that some early muscle-protein-synthesis activity after unfamiliar training may reflect repair and remodelling, rather than predicting the amount of growth seen over weeks of training. That is a much more nuanced picture than “more damage equals more muscle.”
A separate study titled *The Time Course of Short-Term Hypertrophy in the Absence of Eccentric Muscle Damage*, published in 2017, reported small detectable increases in muscle size during an early training period without corresponding significant changes in its selected soreness and damage indicators. That does not settle every debate about hypertrophy mechanisms, but it is difficult to square with the claim that noticeable soreness is mandatory for any growth.
Another wrinkle: even visible short-term changes in muscle size need interpretation. After unfamiliar exercise, swelling and fluid shifts can affect measurements. Researchers have to distinguish an early change in tissue size from sustained increases in contractile muscle. That's one reason a single post-workout sensation or short-term measurement doesn't tell the whole story.
I also think it's useful to separate **soreness, fatigue and actual performance** when we talk about the next session. They can overlap, but they aren't identical. A person might feel tender yet produce similar force on a test, or feel fine while performance is lower for reasons unrelated to DOMS. A study has to measure the outcome it claims to explain.
So what does “the workout worked” even mean? For one person it might mean a strength adaptation over a training block. For another it might mean better movement familiarity or endurance in a repeated task. Those are outcomes evaluated across time, not proven by how tender a muscle feels on one morning. The answer changes with the goal and with how that goal is measured.
None of this is an invitation to ignore severe or unusual pain. DOMS is the research topic here, not a label we should automatically attach to every painful sensation. A forum conversation can't determine what an individual's pain represents. We can keep the discussion focused on how training studies define and measure soreness without making personal diagnoses.
My take: soreness is one piece of information about the experience of training, especially novelty. It is a poor stand-in for progress. The repeated-bout effect is actually a good example of adaptation showing up as **less** soreness, not more. The useful question isn't whether a session hurt afterwards; it's whether the evidence we care about matches the training outcome being claimed.
Let's hear how this has played out for the experienced people here, especially those who've trained the same movements for years. I'm interested in observations, but also in how we avoid mistaking an interesting personal pattern for proof of cause and effect.
1. Have you had a training block with little soreness but clear progress in strength or another measured outcome?
2. When someone calls soreness proof of muscle growth, what distinction between DOMS, muscle damage and adaptation do you think gets missed most often?
3. Which measures over several weeks do you find most persuasive when discussing whether training was productive, and why?
— OLYMPIC