Muscle Soreness: my take

What I’m about to share with you might be an unpopular fitness truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless:

You don’t need to be super sore after a workout in order for it to have been effective

Hear me out…

Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) can be a great thing - a surefire indicator that you’ve delivered a potent training stimulus to a muscle. And I don’t know about you, but I love the feeling.

As it turns out though, soreness is not the be-all and end-all

In fact, you can have incredibly effective training sessions without being sore whatsoever. Sometimes we’ll crush a PR, and barely feel it the next morning. Yet sometimes we’ll have just done the best we could, and be waddling around like a penguin for the best part of a week.

So I believe our outcome measures for training should be performance-driven, not soreness-driven. Seek those incremental gains each week, and watch the effects compound. There’s more to training than chasing soreness. That shouldn’t be a hot take.

So, whilst soreness is an inevitable part of training, you don’t need to kick yourself if you’re not struggling to put on your jacket the next morning.

Side note: if you’re never sore (like, ever), you’re probably not training hard enough.

Seek PRs first and foremost, and DOMS secondary to that.

I’m curious though, where do you tend to get the most sore?

(It’s chest and glutes for me)