What is Soreness

Muscle soreness, better known as delayed onset muscle soreness(DOMS) is a subtle to loud muscular pain signal. Muscle soreness will manifest itself a day or two after a workout or physical activity. Recovery times can vary significantly depending on how sore someone is and how well they manage sleep, protein intake, stress and overall movement.

How does it work

After mechanical stress placed on the body, tissues have become damaged and need to recover and adapt. The more familiar your body is with a particular movement or workout, generally the less sore you will be. However, the more novel the movement is, the more sore you will be and potentially the longer you will be sore for.

As an example, if you haven't played golf in 4-5 months due to it being the off season, that first time back will be demanding to the muscular system and you will be sore for a few days. On the flip side, in the middle of the summer when you play golf for the 20th time that season, likely your body won't be very sore. All of this falls on the SAID principle or Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. If your body isn't adapted and hasn't seen a particular mode of stimulus, it will most likely be sore. The opposite is true if you've done that movement consistently and your body has had adequate time to adapt to it.

How to interpret it

Interpreting soreness is relatively straightforward, empirically speaking. However, psychologically it can be really challenging, especially to do over the long run. Muscle soreness doesn't equate to a better workout or the claim that you're going to build more muscle or strength from that workout. In fact, it has more of the opposite meaning. The more sore you are, generally means the longer it will take you to recover from that workout. That will then limit your ability to workout again with the same amount of intensity to push the weights and overload the body slightly more than the last workout.

In the end, you should look to muscle soreness as a metric for gaging if you did too much. The more sore you are indicates you over reached in your workout. So the next time you go to the gym you can adjust your volume accordingly. The goal isn't to never be sore from a workout, chasing it will be detrimental to progress. You should ideally wake up feeling like you did a workout the previous day, but still have the ability to go workout with the same amount of intensity as the day before.

The gold standard metric to use in workouts

Chasing the feeling of being sore should never be your north star or what is guiding you through workouts. Instead, you should use strength to guide you. I've talked about it in numerous other blogs I've written, but strength needs to be your guiding force. It is the most objective measurement in the gym. Did you get stronger, yes or no. It will then show you if you are on the beaten path, unlike soreness, which can be more subjective in nature. To conclude, chase strength in the gym, not the feeling of subjective accomplishment from a workout.