Does Muscle Soreness Mean Muscle Growth? ("DOMS" Explained)

4 It's a common belief among lifters that the more muscle soreness you experience after your workout, the more your muscles will grow, and it helps indicate the effectiveness of your workout. This often leaves people disheartened when they don't experience muscle soreness after their workout and convinces them to do anything they can in order to achieve the muscle soreness that they once felt. But does muscle soreness actually matter in terms of muscle growth? Well, to answer this, let's focus first take a look at what exactly muscle soreness means and what causes it. Muscle soreness, also known as delayed onset muscle soreness or doms, is a feeling you get in response to the microscopic tears in your muscle fibers that occur from resistance training or just a novel stimulus in general. Now, muscle soreness is viewed as important for muscle growth because, as shown In Brad Schoenfeld's 2010 study, muscle damage is one of the three main mechanisms of muscle growth. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that muscle damage is required for muscle growth, but it may provide provide an additive or synergistic effect to the other mechanisms. And since studies show that muscle soreness is definitely an indication of whether muscle damage took place, one would assume that more muscle soreness leads to more muscle growth. However, the correlation between the two factors is poor. For instance, one anecdotal example, and something that is supported by the literature, is that some muscle groups like the shoulders don't experience muscle soreness to the same degree as other muscle groups like the legs or the biceps for example. But since these muscles that are less prone to soreness still experience growth, it indicates that soreness is not necessary for muscle growth. Another good example is that studies have shown the presence of muscle soreness after long distance running, which many of you can probably relate to. But since running is not associated with significant muscle growth, it once again indicates that muscle soreness is not really suggestive of muscle growth. In addition, too much soreness can be a bad thing if it carries over into your next workouts. Many studies have actually shown that training a muscle while it's still sore can reduce the activation of the desired muscle, reduce the force capacity of the muscle by up to 50%, and negatively interfere with the recovery process. So for example, if you were running an upper lower split and the soreness of your upper body workout carried over into your next upper body workout, this could potentially hinder your muscle growth in the long run for the reasons previously discussed. So in this case you can see how too much muscle soreness can be detrimental, but with that being said, one thing I do like about muscle soreness is that it's a good indicator of if you activated the right muscles or not during your workout. For example, let's say you were doing a chest workout and the next day you really felt the majority of your soreness in your upper traps and front delts as opposed to your chest. So this would help indicate that for your next workout you might need to work on your form regarding the chest exercises and focus on establishing a solid mind to muscle connection with your chest. So just pay attention to where the majority of your soreness is after your workouts as it can really help indicate if the right muscles were activated. So to conclude, what you should take away from this video is that muscle soreness does not indicate muscle growth. But with that being said, there may be an optimal level of soreness that indicates muscle damage took place, yet doesn't compromise recovery or interfere with your next workout. So if you're getting too sore, try initially lowering the volume or intensity of your workouts and ease your way into them over time. And on the other hand, if you're not getting sore at all, it's not a big deal if you're still progressing with your exercises throughout the weeks, since this progression is what's really going to guarantee hypertrophy and increase muscle damage over time regardless of if soreness takes place or not. But with that being said, you can potentially induce more muscle damage by changing up some of your exercises, or consider incorporating eccentric training into your regimen. You can do this by simply adding in one or two eccentric sets per muscle group with a heavier weight than you'd usually use. But regardless, the goal is to find a sweet spot in which you're drawing on all three mechanisms of muscle growth while not getting too sore. And the way to best achieve this will differ for everyone, so you really just have to experiment and see how your body responds.

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