8 Years, and the age old question: Am I Supposed to Feel Sore?

May 15 every year (I think it’s the 15th? :-), marks the anniversary of the formation of DiSalvo Performance Training in 2015. This month, we celebrated 8 years. I appreciate every person who has trained with me, taken time to come to the gym, buy a shirt, tell a friend, or done anything to help spread the word. This 8th year will be really exciting because it’ll mark some major changes at the gym and exciting new opportunities. My hope was to be able to make a few big announcements in conjunction with anniversary month, but we’ll have to wait til the ink dries on that. More to come very soon there.

Now onto today’s topic. Should you feel sore when you work out? Is it a waste of a workout or training session if you don’t?

It’s one those questions I get asked very frequently, but I think people are a bit misguided in how they often answer it— even professionals in my field.

This topic came up last week, not with the beginners at the gym, but rather a few more advanced individuals in response to a very well known coach and organization, Renaissance Periodization, using soreness as one of many metrics to program for muscle growth (or hypertrophy) in their updated programs.

Rather dogmatically for many years, it wasn’t unusual to hear trainers at gyms and buzz-worthy articles say things like “you shouldn’t chase soreness” or “a good workout doesn’t have to end with you being sore.” These refrains became a catch-all, repeated ad nauseam on social media and casually in conversations everywhere.

I understand where a lot of this came from: fitness in a broad sense, should and has steered towards being widely inclusive of many different interests in it. By that, I mean you don’t have to aspire to be a powerlifter or bodybuilder to join your local gym. You can go just for the sake of fun (very important!), and to contribute positively to your health. This is all very important.

If that describes you, then you probably don’t need to use soreness as a metric for your effectiveness when training. You don’t need to destroy yourself. You may even be deterred from future participation by being so sore that you can’t function, so it’s in everyone’s interest to control that.

This perspective is a little bit incomplete though. It doesn’t apply to everyone.

The Full Spectrum of Soreness

Like most things, there’s a spectrum and little bit more nuance. On one end of the spectrum, you have hypertrophy training, aka bodybuilding. Just like Dr Mike Israetel has indicated and Renaissance Periodization uses in their programs— soreness the next day (or even immediately after)— is likely a good indication of how significantly a muscle was worked, and is a good indicator that you are on the right track in growing that muscle (aka working on hypertrophy)… to a point. Muscle growth is based on a few factors, but one of those factors is that enough damage occurs in the muscle to spurn adaptation, but not be so damaged that your body must use other resources to heal the damage and ultimately not contribute to growth. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “stimulate— don’t annihilate,” that’s essentially a good rule of thumb for training to grow your muscles.

Somewhere else on this continuum is strength and it’s a little more complicated there. This can include powerlifting, but also strength training for enhancing sports performance. After all, an increase in the load you train with is a marker of progress in both endeavors. I think when bringing up weak areas of the body (more on that below), soreness can be a really useful indicator that we properly worked the weaker muscles that day (assuming we targeted them). Similarly, soreness in strength training can also be a good indicator of what muscle(s) took a beating in a strength focused workout, and which muscles may need work that we didn’t even account for in the first place.

Soreness though, is not necessarily as useful for strength training as an indicator of progress when you’re dealing with maximal loads at very low reps. You may not be creating the muscle damage by virtue of the low reps to induce soreness, but you certainly improved the contractile quality of the muscle (which is ultimately how you get stronger and what differentiates strength training from hypertrophy training). Strength is very neural, creating a whole other level of fatigue, when properly trained.

What I’ve Done Over the Years, or How You Can Make Sense of This…

Something I’ve noticed is that soreness the next day is a great indicator of your previous day’s training when you have someone who has a measurable weakness in an area or isolated muscle. This is especially true if they say something like “I can never feel my hamstrings” or “I don’t know what it means to ‘feel my glutes.’”

When someone says these things, I am encouraged when they feels sore the next day in those muscles. It’s not a waste if they don’t… but I will be asking a lot of questions and keeping a close eye the next session on how they’re moving in that area.

Another way I use soreness as a tool is to identify how long it lasts. It’s not a perfect science, but if someone is sore in excess of 3 days for a particular muscle group, I typically think that means they went too hard that day. Whether it’s too many sets, too many exercises, too many training days on one muscle group or a combination— that’s usually an indicator that we need to down-regulate a bit.

Lastly, a person who is almost never sore is usually a person who would admit to a degree of stagnation in their training. Again, the aim shouldn’t be to destroy you, but an honest effort at respectable fitness goals will always yield some residual discomfort somewhere, some of the time. I would challenge the person who says they’re very active, but never sore, to really look inward on their results and track record recently.

This obviously is a very brief primer of a much longer discussion that is muscle soreness. Don’t let people tell you with any conviction at either end of the spectrum that the other is wrong… the answer usually leads to more questions.

Thanks again for 8 great years everyone, and here’s to many, many more!