Everything you need to know about muscle soreness. Hosts Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher talk about why soreness is NOT indicative of the quality of a workout, what causes – and what doesn’t cause – it, the difference between muscle soreness and joint pain, and what you can do to reduce that soreness. If you’re someone who exercises on a regular basis, you can’t miss this one!

• Today’s episode, which is a part of a series that looks at indicators of the quality of exercising, focuses on soreness.
• Dr. James Fisher kicks things off by explaining why soreness – or actually delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS in short) – occurs.
• How a workout was and how novel it was are factors that contribute to DOMS.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy Hudson debunk the myths regarding the role that a high degree of lactic acid plays when it comes to exercising and muscle soreness, as well as the idea of torn muscle fibers.
• Calcium plays a key role in muscular contraction: it initiates the process and interaction between actin and myosin muscle fibers.
• Dr. Fisher touches upon the reason why some people may use compression garments that compress muscles, and why muscle inflammation is actually a good thing.
• You know that feeling in the muscle right after a set or a workout? “The pump”, as it’s often referred to, is a product of an influx of blood to the muscle and a product of muscular contraction and energy production.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy discuss muscle pain – and why the pain itself isn’t actually in the muscle but in the connective tissues and fascia surrounding it.
• Feeling sore after a workout? Going back and doing light exercise can help you alleviate it.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy talk about the so-called repeated bout effect and why it’s a strong reason for you not skipping too many workouts…
• Remember: if you feel sore after a workout, that’s a natural process of your body’s remodeling and rebuilding. Not feeling sore? That doesn’t mean that you didn’t have a good workout!
• As Dr. Fisher puts it: “People will feel sore when exercise is a novel stimulus, but the soreness will alleviate over time as a part of the repeated bout effect.”
• Keep in mind the muscle soreness you feel may actually be joint soreness.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy share some recommendations for working out a muscle group when you feel some muscle soreness.
• A healthy diet (with an adequate protein intake to support the repair process) and sleep are key assets in alleviating muscle soreness.
• Some people overlook the importance of sleep, which is a big marker for our body’s ability to rest, recover, and rebuild.​​
• When feeling muscle soreness, getting on a stationary bike or going for a swim, instead of going for a run, can help with the recovery process.
• Making progressive overload a key “philosophy” of your workout sessions will help you decrease muscle soreness.
• A final, important reminder from Amy and Dr. Fisher: “Soreness is not indicative of the quality of our workout. It’s not a badge of honor.” 

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It’s going to be easier to do, not only because I’m stronger, but also the chance of me feeling sore afterwards is going down as well. That’s encouraging because I know I’m making progress.

If you do feel sore after a workout, that’s okay. But if you don’t feel sore after a workout, that doesn’t mean that you didn’t have a good workout.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and wellbeing. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios.

My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back, everyone.

We have been in a series of episodes identifying certain things that people sometimes look to as an indication of the quality of exercise. For example, we talked about sweating in the past in one of the podcasts where we broke down the myth that how much I sweat is determinative of the quality of my workout. Another one people point to in this area is soreness. This episode is on all things soreness and so in this episode we’re going to talk about a lot of things but you’re going to learn why soreness is not indicative of the quality of a workout, what causes muscle soreness, what does not cause muscle soreness, should we expect to feel sore on a regular basis as we are strength training and making that a regular part of our life. We’ll chat about the difference between muscle soreness, being sore in a muscle group you worked, and joint pain, how to distinguish the difference in terms of knowing if you’re just sore or hurt, and how we can reduce or experience less soreness when we do run into that. So that is what we’re going to talk about today. Dr. Fisher is ready to dive into this topic. How are you doing today, Dr. Fisher?

I’m doing fantastic, Amy. I’m really excited to talk about this today. Um, how are you? You do you well?

I’m well, I’m well. I’m not sore today.

Are you sore today?

I’m not sore today. I’m not sore today. I think it’s coming tomorrow. So that leads me into kind of the first thing. It’s delayed onset muscle soreness. So yeah, so we use the term soreness, but actually in as a product of exercise, it’s actually called delayed onset muscle soreness, or it’s abbreviated to DOMS. And it’s this idea or it’s this concept that immediately post exercise, sort of within the first couple of hours, we feel fatigued. We feel like we’ve done a workout. And this holds true for aerobic exercise as well as strength training workouts. And so my behind is the interval training, running, cycling, swimming, or our strength training sessions. We feel this degree of fatigue in the subsequent sort of 12 to 24 hours. We might generally feel okay. There might be some mild soreness but potentially not even sort of noticeable. And then after that we get this kind of kick in. So it’s only 24 hours after a workout we start to get this soreness kick in and it normally peaks around 24 to 72 hours post exercise. Hence why it’s called delayed onset muscle soreness, it’s not immediately after the workout. And then of course it starts to resolve itself and it subsides and we kind of eventually will go back to feeling completely normal and feeling great and so forth. And the degree of soreness that we experience is to some extent a product of the workout itself and a product of how novel for workout was. So if it’s something that we haven’t done for a long time, if I went out the door now and I ran a marathon, you could guarantee that I would feel fatigued for a pretty long time, but the soreness would really, would really be quite high at that sort of delayed period, that 24 hour to 72 hour period.

And I think everybody can picture that and has experienced something like that where I don’t pick apples every day or reorganize my garage every day. And so, the days I do and I work really hard and lifting things over my head, maybe later my muscles in my shoulders are sore and I know why that is, right? Yes.

Mason Okay. So then we can probably get into what does and actually what doesn’t cause muscle soreness. So, the kind of the commonly held myths or the accepted wisdom to some extent over history have been, well the first of which has been that there’s a high degree of lactic acid that we have done exercise and as our body produces energy at a biological level within the muscle itself. A byproduct of that can be blood lactate or lactic acid. And we do certainly increase our acidity within the muscle by a product of hydrogen ions within those chemical reactions. But one of the things that we know is that they increase very much in the short term and then they subside again relatively quickly and there’s certainly no link between acidity in the muscle and soreness in the muscle. So in our initial fatigue, sort of within a short period after exercise, we might have a high degree of acidity within our blood as a product of energy production. But at the 24-hour period and 48 and 72 hours post-exercise, we can test somebody’s blood lactate levels, and their blood lactate levels can be completely normal.

So we know that the soreness isn’t caused by high blood lactate. So we can kind of get rid of that myth straight away. And then the second myth that often comes to mind is this idea of torn muscle fibers. Now, to some extent, there is microtrauma within a muscle, but it’s not this kind of grandiose picture of, I’ve got this muscle fiber and as I’ve done the exercise, it’s not this kind of grandiose picture of, I’ve got this muscle fiber and as I’ve done the exercise, it’s literally been ripped apart and now it has to rebuild.

It’s just not that black and white. It’s not that clear cut. So we can kind of get to the point where we know it’s not blood lactate increases and we know it’s not damage to the muscle fibers themselves. So then we can start to think, okay, well, what does cause the muscle soreness

that we experience specifically after a resistance training workout? Well, there is a small amount of direct damage to muscle fibers and it’s primarily as a product of eccentric muscle actions. So if I were to run a marathon, it’s not when I push off the ground and I lift my legs up that I’m going to do damage.

It’s when I land back down and I absorb that impact and my muscles lengthen. Or in a strength training session, if I’m doing a chest press, it’s not so much when I press the weight away, it’s when the weight comes back towards me or when the lever arm comes back towards me and my muscle fibers are being lengthened. And this is a product of what’s called stretch activated calcium channels. And calcium plays a key role within muscular contraction. It kind of plays a key role in initiating the process and the interaction between actin and myosin muscle fibers. So we know that there’s obviously a lot of calcium happening within the muscle. And then as we have this eccentric muscle action, the calcium channels actually, they’re the ones that experience this damage. And that leads to an elevated amount of calcium within the muscle itself. And that leads to activation of enzymes which promote inflammation within the muscle. So along with the soreness that we might feel or the delayed onset muscle soreness that we might feel as a product of a workout, we might experience some swelling. So we might experience some edema within the muscle as well. And a lot of people will feel that they can wear kind of garments that compress the muscle and that feels more comfortable, that to some extent alleviates the soreness. And this is in part why, because we’re actually kind of alleviating that edema with that compression feels quite nice against that inflammation that’s occurred. But that inflammation is actually good, we want that inflammation to occur because it’s actually that that’s the rebuilding or remodeling of the muscle itself. So we can look at this muscle soreness and this muscle damage and this, uh, inflammation as being a really healthy product of the workout that we’ve done. Um, the other reason why kind of compression garments often feel nice is because if, for example, my quadriceps and my hamstrings are sore. From, uh, from a leg press or from knee extensions or from running, then as I walk around, the muscle will kind of naturally move and shake a little bit. And any compression garment will hold the muscle in place. So I won’t have to feel that kind of natural shaking movement as well. So there are some of the approaches or we’ll get into, uh, get into this a little bit later about how we can cope with the muscle soreness a little bit.

Got it. Interesting. Yeah, that is, I think, again, I think people have probably experienced that is that immediately following a workout that kind of they feel the, some people call it swole, right? Where their muscles feel larger.

Is that the same thing as what you’re describing with the inflammation taking place following the exercise or is this later on in the process?

The inflammation will occur generally 24 hours plus. So it’s not, we feel an edema in the muscle immediately after a workout. Uh, and often that’s sort of referred to as the pump. And that’s a product of kind of an influx of, um, blood to the muscle. Another kind of metabolites as a product of energy as a product, sorry, of muscular contraction and energy production. So there’s a lot happened there, but ultimately that’s because the muscle has worked. It’s not because the muscle has reached a rebuilding phase. At this 24-hour post-workout period, we’re at that rebuilding phase and remodeling, and that’s when the soreness is really going to kind of kick in.

Dr. Willis So that’s very helpful to distinguish. So it’s not lactic acid buildup that’s causing soreness, and it’s not even microtrauma, but it’s really just the natural inflammation that is a result of the activity in the muscle, especially during the eccentric muscle action that is causing that repair process to happen, and that has soreness associated with it on occasion. Is that an accurate summary? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it gets more interesting because the pain that we actually experience, the soreness that we experience, we often say that’s from the muscle, it’s within the muscle. It’s actually not technically within the muscle. The muscle doesn’t have very good pain receptors. They’re actually predominantly located in connective tissues and in the fascia that surrounds the muscle itself. So it’s not likely that when our muscle contracts that we experience more pain. It’s likely that when there is electrical activity in the tissue surrounding the muscle, potentially as a product of contraction, that we experience pain. So, interestingly enough, one of the approaches to kind of overcome muscle soreness can be to go back and do light exercise and we shouldn’t necessarily experience more pain as a product of doing that. We can actually kind of alleviate that muscle soreness and in doing so what we’re doing is kind of flushing in blood and flushing out other metabolites and helping that kind of remodeling process to occur. Interesting.

Okay.

So then, you know, is this something we should expect ongoing as we’re strength training or can our bodies start adapting?

Yeah, that’s a really great question. So we have what’s called the repeated bout effect. And basically what this says is if I do something once, then my body has a kind of a shock response to that instant, that event. Whereas if I now repeat that event, my body doesn’t have the same shock response to it. It kind of creates, it becomes accustomed to it.

So if you go out for the first time and you do a hard workout, then you might be sore for a couple of days and maybe even two or three days and then eventually it will alleviate. But when you next do the workout, even if it’s the same workout with the same weights and the same repetitions and the same volume of training, you almost certainly won’t feel the same extent of soreness. And a lot of this is because your body’s made changes based on that initial response. So the collagen fibers and non-collagenous components have remodeled.

There’s remodeling of some of the structures that contain calcium. There’s an ability to uptake calcium in the mitochondria. So our body’s ability to deal with that exercise and to deal with the damage that that exercise causes has improved. So our efficiency in handling that muscle damage is far, far greater. And so we won’t experience the same degree of muscle soreness. And that’s obviously great news because what that means is that, hey, we do that one workout and we feel sore, but I know I won’t feel the sore the next time. But it’s also a really good kind of guide to say, hey, I don’t want to skip a workout or I certainly don’t want to skip too many workouts because my body will fall back into that pattern. And then when I do go back to training, I’ll experience that muscle soreness again.

Yeah.

And I can see how it could be more motivating to avoid having that. I don’t think a lot of people enjoy feeling soreness, you know, for very long anyway. And so, um, if I know I’m going to do something and it’s going to be challenging to do in the moment, and I’m going to be sore after, it’s easy to talk myself out of something like that. But if I know that over time it’s going to be easier to do, not only because I’m stronger, but also the chance of me feeling sore afterwards is going down as well, that’s encouraging because I know I’m making progress. Yeah. And of course, the reality is that soreness is not indicative of a good workout. You know, some people walk around and act like the soreness they experience in their muscles is a badge of honor, as if this is going to be in some way indicative of enhancing greater adaptations compared to somebody who doesn’t feel sore after a workout. And that’s simply not the case. Um, what we know is that people will feel sore when exercise is a novel stimulus, but this soreness will alleviate over time as a, as a part of the repeated bout effect. So if you do feel sore after a workout, that’s okay. It’s a natural process of the body’s remodeling and rebuilding. But if you don’t feel sore after a workout, that doesn’t mean that you didn’t have a good workout. The stimulus for a workout, which we’ve talked about in the past and I’m sure we’ll talk about again, is the idea of reaching as close to momentary failure or volitional fatigue as we can. It’s that recruitment of all available muscle fibers. It’s not muscular soreness, you know, 24 to 72 hours post-workout. And of course, the other thing that we can talk about in context of feeling sore is that there’s a difference between muscular soreness and joint soreness. Now, if somebody feels soreness in their quadriceps or their hamstring or in their bicep or their tricep, that’s relatively easy to identify that that’s actually muscle soreness. You know my biceps have done a workout and as a product of the workout itself I feel some soreness in that 24 to 72 hours post workout. But when we get to joints and muscles like our deltoids and our shoulder joint, it’s a little bit harder to differentiate. There are certainly going to be some clients out there and some people who train out there who will sometimes feel some soreness in their shoulder post-workout or 24 hours or so after a workout. And at that stage, it’s very, very difficult to determine whether that soreness from the muscle, from working hard, or that soreness in the joint from, from maybe moving through a range of motion that we shouldn’t have worked through or pressing or being in an uncomfortable position at the time we were doing it.

So I think that we can be really careful over how we experience this soreness as well. And of course, the key thing that I would say is talk to your personal trainer, your exercise coach, um, about this soreness. If you go, if you’re going back for a workout and you feel some soreness, explain to the coach that you feel that soreness and they’ll maybe ask follow-up questions. Okay. Is it sore when you make this movement? Does it hurt when you make this movement? And they might be able to help you differentiate between whether it’s actually muscular soreness or joint soreness, of course, muscular soreness, as we’ve said, is not bad.

Joint soreness might be indicative that something we did was not perfect.

Right. something we did was not perfect. Right, or maybe you had some external injury that is causing your joint to be hurting today. So that’s a separate issue, right? And it’s something that needs to be addressed in a different way, obviously. And then how would you recommend somebody work a muscle group that is sore if they’re in a studio for a workout?

Ian Yeah, so I think that if somebody has a high degree of soreness, then I think we can ask the question whether they’re ready to go back and do a full strength training session. It might be that giving themselves another 24 hours is of benefit. We’ve got to remember that that soreness is a product of that muscle rebuilding or remodeling. So the last thing we want to do is interrupt that by breaking it all down again.

But that said, what we can do is we can do some light recovery. So that will promote blood flow to connective tissues. And as we said, talk about sort of nutritional infiltration into the muscle itself which will promote you know potentially quicker recovery and certainly help us to feel better and alleviate that soreness. If somebody’s had a workout if I’d done a workout a couple days back and I felt really sore today then I would say hey it’s not the end of the world I’m going to skip today

I’m going to work out tomorrow. If today is my only day to train, then I’m probably going to go ahead with the workout because I think there’s a benefit to doing so. But what I can do is I can reduce the range of motion even more so that my muscle isn’t lengthening to the same extent and I might find that it’s more comfortable to maybe even reduce the weight a little bit or reduce the volume of the workouts. It’s not so many exercises or so forth.

But I think if it’s a very intense muscle soreness, potentially giving ourselves an extra day of recovery is the way forward.

Yeah, that’s important to educate clients that we want to try to schedule our workouts so that our body is recovered enough in order to perform how we would like to perform during the next workout, right? So those are some good tips too that you just mentioned on reducing muscle soreness. Do you have any other tips on how to reduce it? Yeah, absolutely. So if we’ve got muscle soreness and we want to now kind of reduce the, uh, the effects of it and the, you know, because it, because obviously it’s very, it can be very painful and it can be really sort of inhibit our day-to-day activity. Uh, a couple of key things are a proper nutrition, which I think stands to reason. So we want adequate protein intake to support the repair process. We want, uh, you know, good fruits and vegetables and healthy content of micronutrients and antioxidants that are likely to promote quicker recovery. And of course sleep. Sleep is the big marker for our body’s ability to rest, recover, rebuild. It allows our hormones to reduce, it allows inflammatory markers to reduce and so forth. So if we’ve already got that soreness then yes nutrition and sleep are going to be key. And we’ve already talked about active recovery. One of the key things that I would say about that is if you have muscular soreness in your legs let’s say, then going for a run even if’s a light run, might not be the best way to go because of course as you run you’re gonna land and you’re gonna have that eccentric loading again. Getting on a stationary bike or even going out for a bike ride or going for a swim where you don’t have the same impact and you don’t have the same eccentric loading can be a really nice way to kind of get the muscles to move but not with the same impact and the same loading and muscle lengthening. If we want to avoid muscle soreness or minimize muscle soreness altogether, and of course most people will follow this process anyway within their strength training, then the key is something called progressive overload. And that’s that we don’t do a workout and go 100% out as much as I can do, as long as I can train for in that first session, because that’s going to induce a high degree of muscle soreness. If we’re maybe just getting back into a workout, or if it’s our first workout, we maybe do only two or three exercises, or three or four exercises, split them around the body so we’re not over training certain muscles and then in the next session we can maybe build up to more exercises or we can increase our effort level and increase the resistance we work to. And of course that that progressive overload is a natural product of strength training over the longterm. As we get stronger, we generally will either increase the weight we use, or we will apply more force if we’re using the exerbotics devices, we will see our forces go up, um, as our muscles get stronger. And that is of course our progressive overload. So, so there’s a few kind of different approaches there.

Yeah, pretty encouraging to hear. And I think that is a really good synopsis in my mind of sort of soreness overall in terms of what causes it, what does not cause it, should I expect to feel it long term or not, how can I reduce it if I have it? And just understanding it, not being afraid of it, but understanding that it’s part of the repair process. It is a good sign because I worked some muscles, right?

If I have joint pain, that’s different from muscle soreness. And again, activating muscles is a good thing for me, right? And so all of that is what I’ve taken away from this conversation. And even the point that you made about being able to still exercise the right ways to maybe consider exercising if this is my exercise day, if I’ve actively sore today, all of that’s super, super helpful. Any other remarks that you wanna make on this topic?

No, I think we covered everything. The thing that I’d reiterate is that soreness really isn’t a badge of honor. We don’t, you know, if we don’t feel soreness after a workout, that’s not indicative that we didn’t have a productive workout. So it’s important to remember that.

Exactly. Yep, soreness is not indicative of the quality of our workout. It’s not your badge of honor. All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Fisher, for breaking all that down for us. We will see you next week on the podcast. Remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend.

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