Why You're Always Sore: The Truth About DOMS + Consistency

Why You're Always Sore: The Truth About DOMS and Consistency

You being sore from working out in the gym is you coming back and having to pay the piper for not being consistent.

That sounds harsh, but the mechanism behind it is pretty simple once you walk the whole chain, so let me lay out the full path before zooming into any one piece of it.

When you train, certain contractions, especially the lowering part of a rep where the muscle is lengthening under load, create small amounts of mechanical damage inside the muscle fiber. Your body responds with an inflammatory process, fluid moves into the area, and the nerve endings around that tissue get more sensitive. Then, somewhere between twelve and forty eight hours later, you feel it, and it usually peaks around the two day mark before fading out over the next several days.

That whole sequence is what people are describing when they say delayed onset muscle soreness, and the timeline of it has been documented for decades (Armstrong 1984).

Here is the piece that actually decides whether you stay sore or not.

Most of the time, damaging the muscle comes from the fact that it hasn't been used for so long that when you do actually use it, your body's not used to it, therefore incurs that damage.

Think of your muscle like skin on your hands. If you grab a barbell once a month, your palms tear up. If you grab it four times a week, you build callus, and the same load stops doing damage. The tissue did not get tougher by luck, it got tougher because it kept meeting the same stress and adapted to handle it.

The same pattern plays out inside the muscle itself, just below the surface you can see. Training a movement once gives you meaningful protection against soreness the next time you do it, and that protection can carry for weeks. It goes by the name repeated bout effect, which just means the second session damages you far less than the first one did (Cheung 2003).

So when you take three weeks off and come back to the same weight you were handling before, you are not being punished for training hard. You are getting billed for the callus you let soften.

So what's the best way to solve the problem related to your delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS? It's to commit to yourself that you're gonna stay consistent.

Fancier warmups won't fix it, and neither will more stretching. Not a cold plunge or a foam roller, both of which have been studied plenty and neither of which reliably fixes the underlying tissue damage (Hotfiel 2018).

Consistency is the thing that removes the cause instead of chasing the symptom.

A lot of people believe that they're not actually going to get results from their workouts unless they felt sore afterwards.

I understand where that belief comes from, because soreness is the only feedback most people get in the first few months of training. A muscle fiber adapting isn't something you can watch happen. But you can feel your legs scream on the stairs the next day, so that becomes the scorecard.

That's not necessarily true.

I have never seen a study land on soreness as a requirement for adaptation, and what I see in the gym is that the guys making the most progress are usually the least sore, because they have been showing up long enough that their bodies stopped treating the work as an emergency. Soreness tracks novelty far more than it tracks effort.

Which means if you keep taking two weeks off and coming back, you will feel sore forever, and you will keep mistaking that soreness for progress while your actual strength stays flat.

Acclimate your body to be able to perform under that stimulus.

Research: Armstrong RB, Med Sci Sports Exerc 1984; Cheung K, Hume P, Maxwell L, Sports Med 2003; Hotfiel T et al., Sportverletz Sportschaden 2018.

References:

Cheung K, Hume P, Maxwell L. Delayed onset muscle soreness : treatment strategies and performance factors. Sports Med. 2003. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12617692/

Hotfiel T, Freiwald J, Hoppe MW et al.. Advances in Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS): Part I: Pathogenesis and Diagnostics. Sportverletz Sportschaden. 2018. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30537791/

Armstrong RB. Mechanisms of exercise-induced delayed onset muscular soreness: a brief review. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1984. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6392811/