How to Reduce Muscle Soreness

If you exercise regularly, and especially if you lift weights, you’ve probably gotten used to stiff, sore muscles (especially after legs day!).

We all learn to just deal with it, but sometimes it can be quite uncomfortable.

Fortunately, there are some simple, scientifically proven strategies that reduce muscle soreness (and no, reducing muscle soreness won’t reduce your gains!).

But before we go over the strategies, I want to first address a common misconception about muscle soreness: that it means your muscles are growing.

It doesn’t, and it turns out that how sore your muscles get after a workout isn’t necessarily a good way to judge the effectiveness of your training.

Muscle Soreness Doesn't Necessarily Mean Muscle Growth
How to Reduce Muscle Soreness and Improve Muscle Recovery
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Muscle Soreness Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Muscle Growth

Most people think that really sore muscles is a good sign–that it means the muscles are growing.

This seems to make intuitive sense, of course. We’re training to damage our muscles, and muscle damage leads to muscle soreness, so therefore little or no soreness would mean little or no damage and thus little or no gains, right?

It turns out it’s not that simple.

Workouts that create large amounts of muscle soreness won’t necessarily result in muscle growth, and workouts that cause little-to-no soreness can result in significant muscle growth.

For instance, if you do an hour of downhill running, your legs are going to be very sore the next day, but downhill running is definitely not going to build big, strong legs.

To quote researchers from Yokohama City University:

“Because of generally poor correlations between DOMS [delayed onset muscle soreness] and other indicators, we conclude that use of DOMS is a poor reflector of eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage and inflammation, and changes in indirect markers of muscle damage and inflammation are not necessarily accompanied with DOMS.”

In other words, damaged muscles won’t necessarily hurt, and muscles that hurt aren’t necessarily much damaged. (Click to tweet this!)

The exact physiology behind this isn’t fully understood yet (muscle growth is a very complicated process), but one study demonstrated that at least some of the pain we’re feeling in muscle soreness stems from the connective tissue holding muscle fibers together, not from the actual fibers themselves.

We also know that the more often the muscles are exposed to certain types of stimuli, the less sore they become as a result. That doesn’t mean they won’t grow bigger and stronger, though.

Certain exercises also cause more soreness than others, but those aren’t necessarily the most effective exercises for building strength or size. For instance, the stretching involved in dumbbell flys is likely to cause soreness, but they’re a pretty poor movement for adding mass when compared to something like incline bench press, which is likely to cause less soreness.

Personally, I only get really sore from a workout if I missed it the week prior. When I’m in my normal routine, I only get mildly sore, and I work hard in the gym. And I continue to build strength and size.

So, the bottom line with muscle soreness is this: it doesn’t tell us much regarding whether we’re making gains or not. Don’t think that excessive soreness means major muscle growth, and don’t worry if you’re not getting sore. (Click to tweet this!)