Muscle soreness after lifting

Being sore feels like proof. You did something, you can feel it the next day, so it must have counted. It's the most natural way to judge a session and it's the one most people use.

The trouble is that somebody tested it properly, and this page is mostly about what they found.

The short version

What soreness actually is

The stiff, tender feeling a day or two after a hard session has a name, delayed onset muscle soreness, usually shortened to DOMS.

It isn't the muscle being tired. It's inflammation, set off by very small tears in the connective tissue around and inside the muscle, which makes the nerve endings there more sensitive to pressure. That's why a sore muscle hurts when you press it or stretch it more than it hurts sitting still.

It usually turns up 6 to 8 hours after you train and is at its worst around 48 hours. How long it lasts varies a lot between people. Lowering a weight under control produces more of it than lifting one does, which is why the day after your first set of walking lunges is memorable.

The experiment that answers this

In 2011 Flann and colleagues did the study the question needs. They took two groups and set out to make one sore and keep the other from getting sore.

The first group started training gradually over 3 weeks, easing in. The second was thrown straight into a hard first session. Then both did the same 8 week program, and, crucially, the researchers matched the total amount of work the two groups did.

It worked. The second group reported the soreness and had over 5 times as much creatine kinase in their blood, which is the marker for muscle damage. The first group had neither.

Then they measured what everyone actually trains for.

Same work in, same muscle out, and the soreness made no difference to it. The authors put it plainly: muscle rebuilding can start without any detectable damage to the muscle.

That study used a cycling machine rather than free weights, so take the design rather than the numbers. What transfers is the logic. They changed the soreness, held the work steady, and the results didn't follow the soreness.

So does it mean anything at all?

A little, and this is where most pages on this subject overshoot in one direction or the other.

In 2013 Schoenfeld and Contreras reviewed the evidence for the National Strength and Conditioning Association. They didn't conclude that soreness is meaningless. They said it gives you a small amount of information about whether you caused any muscle damage, and that there's some argument for causing damage if size is what you're after.

What they then said is the part that matters. Soreness tracks the actual damage so poorly that you can't draw conclusions from it, and it shouldn't be used as a real measure of whether a session was any good.

So it's a weak signal, not a missing one. Feeling sore doesn't mean you wasted your time, and feeling nothing doesn't either. It just isn't the thing to steer by.

Why yours is different from theirs

Three reasons, and none of them is about how hard you worked.

People differ, a lot. Some lifters are sore after most sessions and others are almost never sore, and that difference holds up even among very experienced ones. There's no evidence that the people who don't get sore build less muscle. If you train next to someone who's wrecked every Tuesday and you never are, that tells you about the two of you, not about the training.

Your own muscles differ. Experienced lifters report that some muscles almost never get sore on them while others always do, and research backs that up. The telling part is that the muscles that never get sore are still well developed. So "my chest never feels it" isn't evidence your chest work is failing.

Position changes it more than effort does. Exercises that load a muscle while it's stretched long produce far more soreness than exercises that load it short. A flat dumbbell fly and a close chest press can be equally worth doing and feel completely different the next morning. That's the exercise, not the quality of your set.

Why it stops happening, and why that's fine

Soreness fades as you repeat an exercise. Do something once and it hurts. Do it every week and it stops hurting, even at the same weight.

People read that as going backwards. It's the opposite: it's the muscle adapting to something it now recognises. Train a muscle often and you'll be less sore than someone training it once a fortnight, while building at least as much.

Which means soreness quietly punishes the thing you want. The more consistent you are, the less you feel, so anyone using soreness as their scorecard ends up rating their best stretch of training as their worst.

The two things everyone recommends

Both have been measured, and neither does what it's sold as. This is about what they do to your training, not about how to feel better, which is a question for a physiotherapist rather than a website.

Stretching. A Cochrane review pooled 12 studies. Stretching before training reduced next-day soreness by half a point on a 100 point scale. Afterwards, about 1 point. Doing both, in a trial of 2,377 people, moved peak soreness across a week by 4 points out of 100, which the authors themselves call very small. Stretch because you want to. It isn't a soreness fix.

Cold water. This one has a real cost. In 2015 Roberts and colleagues had 21 active men strength train for 12 weeks, half sitting in cold water for 10 minutes after every session and half doing light active recovery instead. The active recovery group gained more strength and more muscle. Their fast twitch fibres grew 17% and the cold water group's didn't measurably grow at all. The researchers' own conclusion was that using cold water as a routine habit after training should be reconsidered.

What to use instead

• Judge a session by what you lifted, not by how you feel about it two days later. Reps and weight are countable and soreness isn't.
• Don't add work to a session because the last one didn't leave you sore. That's the reasoning this whole page argues against.
• Don't take heavy soreness as a win. It changes how you move, it can stop you using the muscle you were trying to train, and it's the main reason people skip the next session.
• Expect a new exercise to hurt more than a familiar one at the same effort. That's novelty, not progress.

The countable version is what the workout builder is for. It logs every set against a weight, so next week you're comparing numbers instead of comparing two memories of how rough Tuesday was.

This is also the same mistake as chasing failure on every set, wearing different clothes: both take a sensation and treat it as a measurement. And if what you're really asking is when you'll see a change, the answer is on how long it takes to build muscle, which separates swelling from actual muscle.

Common questions

Do sore muscles mean I am getting stronger?

Not reliably. In one 8 week study, one group was deliberately made sore and another was deliberately kept from getting sore, doing the same total work. They gained the same muscle, and strength went up 25% in the group that was not sore against 26% in the group that was. Soreness came along for the ride rather than causing anything.

Is it good to be really sore after lifting weights?

No. Heavy soreness is a sign you did more than the muscle could comfortably repair, and it costs you. It changes how you move, it can reduce how well you use the muscle you were trying to train, and it makes people skip sessions. Mild soreness is not a problem. Chasing it is.

I never get sore. Am I doing something wrong?

Probably not. Soreness varies enormously between people, and that holds true even in very experienced lifters. Some are sore after most sessions and some almost never are. There is no evidence that people who do not get sore build less muscle.

How long should muscles be sore after lifting?

Soreness usually shows up 6 to 8 hours after a session and is at its worst around 48 hours. The timing varies a lot from person to person, so treat that as a rough shape rather than a schedule. Soreness that keeps getting worse, or that lasts well beyond a few days, is worth showing to a physiotherapist.

Why am I not sore any more from an exercise that used to wreck me?

Because you adapted to it, which is the point. Soreness fades as you repeat the same exercise, and it fades faster the more often you do it. Training something frequently reduces the soreness while still building the muscle, so a familiar exercise that no longer hurts is not a wasted one.

Does soreness mean my muscles are still recovering?

Not exactly. Soreness and recovery are measured differently and they do not track each other well. You can be sore while your strength is back, and you can have lost strength without much soreness. If you want to know whether you have recovered, compare what you can lift rather than how you feel.

Does stretching stop soreness?

Barely. Pooling 12 studies, stretching before exercise reduced next-day soreness by half a point on a 100 point scale, and stretching afterwards by about 1 point. Stretching both before and after moved peak soreness across a week by 4 points out of 100. Stretch if you like it. It is not a soreness fix.

Do ice baths help?

They come with a cost worth knowing. Over 12 weeks of strength training, men who sat in cold water after each session gained less strength and less muscle than men who did light active recovery instead. The researchers concluded that using it as a routine recovery habit should be reconsidered.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure on this page comes from one of 4 papers. We store the fetched record for each one, so the author list and the population you're reading are the ones the paper actually has.

• Schoenfeld BJ, Contreras B, 2013. Is Postexercise Muscle Soreness a Valid Indicator of Muscular Adaptations? Strength and Conditioning Journal 35:16 to 21. A review for the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and the source of the answer this page gives.
• Flann KL, LaStayo PC, McClain DA, Hazel M, Lindstedt SL, 2011. Muscle damage and muscle remodeling: no pain, no gain? Journal of Experimental Biology 214:674 to 679. Two groups, 8 weeks, work matched. The source of the 25 and 26% figures.
• Herbert RD, de Noronha M, Kamper SJ, 2011. Stretching to prevent or reduce muscle soreness after exercise. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews CD004577. Twelve studies. The source of the stretching numbers.
• Roberts LA, Raastad T, Markworth JF and colleagues, 2015. Post-exercise cold water immersion attenuates acute anabolic signalling and long-term adaptations in muscle to strength training. Journal of Physiology 593:4285 to 4301. 21 active men, 12 weeks.

What this page does not claim: it gives no advice on treating soreness. It says nothing about massage, foam rolling, painkillers, supplements or what to eat, because none of the papers here measured any of those. It doesn't tell you whether to train while sore, which depends on your body and isn't something a page can see. The Flann study used a cycling machine rather than free weights, and everyone in the cold water study was male. The review does note that men and women don't appear to differ in how sore they get.

If a lift hurts rather than being hard, stop and see a physiotherapist.