In this video, I go into the science behind muscle soreness. We look into why you feel less sore over time, what muscle soreness actually means and more. First I go into the cause of muscle soreness.

When you train with weights, your muscles are under stress. If your muscles are not accustomed to this training stress, your muscles experience more physical micro-tears than usual. Micro-tears in muscle is often referred to as “muscle damage.” A by-product of muscle damage muscle is the sensation of soreness. Also known as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). You typically experience the most muscle soreness after 24-48 hours of “muscle-damaging” training.

As mentioned, mostly training you are not used to yet tends to cause a lot of soreness. So you’ll experience the most muscle soreness after a training break or if you start performing new exercises in your routine. This especially holds true if some of the exercises you do train your muscles at long lengths or overload the eccentric portion of a lift. The eccentric or the lowering down of the weight tends to cause greater micro-tears in muscle.

Research shows that as you train consistently, your muscles experience less muscle damage. This protective mechanism against muscle damage is known as the “repeated bout effect” in exercise sciences. Because muscle damage is reduced with consistent training, you also experience less muscle soreness over time. This is a perfectly normal training adaptation.

Because of the increased popularity of the “no pain, no gain” mentality, many people think that their training is less effective if they don’t experience much soreness. But soreness is a poor indicator of whether you are training effectively for muscle development.

In the video, I go into more detail on muscle soreness recovery tips. Evidence-based strategies to reduce soreness are discussed to help you recover from sore muscles. These strategies include foam rolling, active recovery, and massaging.

I also briefly go into introductory training cycles for when you come from a training break to prevent excessive soreness from coming up in the first place.

Throughout the video, I reference several studies

Repeated Bout Effect:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25647658

Soreness & Bench Press Strength:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28595855

Active Recovery Soreness:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27704555

Foam Rolling Sore Muscles:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299735/

Massage Sore Muscles:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29755363


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