Muscle Soreness Isn’t the Sign of a Good Workout | Path to Gains | Men’s Health Muscle
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00:00So yesterday you crushed a huge workout of squats, deadlifts, and lunges, and today your
00:04body is as sore as it's ever been.
00:07And that's obviously going to mean you had a great workout, right?
00:10Wrong.
00:11Contrary to popular belief, the level of soreness you're feeling in your body has nothing
00:15to do with whether you had an effective workout or not.
00:18I get why you think it might though, because for years, I thought that every workout was
00:22defined only by the soreness I felt the next day.
00:25And if I didn't get sore, I figured I hadn't trained hard enough and I wasn't going to
00:28grow any new muscle.
00:30Very often, this was something called delayed onset muscle soreness, which is very broadly
00:35defined as muscle soreness that arrives and is felt within your muscles, not your joints,
00:40joint pain is bad, a day or two after a workout.
00:44And very often we think it means we've had a great workout.
00:47Except the truth is, soreness has only a limited correlation to your ability to train, and
00:52very often it's stealthily killing your gains.
00:55So soreness does have a purpose in your workouts, and it has a ton of value, it's just a poor
00:59measure of how we're actually training.
01:02Chasing soreness in your workouts creates a couple problems.
01:05First off, it's going to lead you to overtrain.
01:08When you push for only soreness in every single workout, as your body adapts, you set it up
01:12to fail.
01:14Whether you're building neurological competency or getting better at exercises, or whether
01:18you're simply getting stronger and building more muscle, with each passing workout, it
01:22takes more and more and more to actually make you get sore.
01:26And that means workouts get longer, or workout intensity gets harder and harder.
01:30And all that constant training and training more intensely, without any regard to anything
01:35but soreness, could lead to injury.
01:37It could lead you to alter your form as well, and this is our second problem, because in
01:41your next session you might tweak how you're doing things.
01:44Let's say your chest is massively sore after a big bench press day because you've been
01:48pushing only to make your chest sore.
01:51Then the next day you go in to train shoulders with overhead presses.
01:55Because your chest is sore, you may alter your typical bar path on your overhead presses,
01:59and that's grooving really bad mechanics, both for this workout and possibly for your
02:03next shoulder session too.
02:05And once again, that's setting you up for injury.
02:08If you're always pushing to be sore, and you're wearing yourself out like that, you're also
02:11never entering a situation where you're fresh.
02:14And that means you're never ever going to really get to train at your strongest, and
02:17you're never going to get a chance to move your heaviest weights.
02:20If you're not moving those heavy weights, then again, we're stealthily killing our gains
02:24because we've got to move bigger loads in order to get stronger in the long term.
02:28So instead of thinking about soreness as your barometer for a good workout, let's refocus
02:32on a couple other ideas.
02:33Your goal for a good workout should never simply to be to train hard and be sore.
02:38Instead, we're generally training hard so that we can accomplish other goals, like building
02:42muscle, or building strength, or improving our performance on a basketball court or a
02:46football field.
02:47To reach those goals, you need to recalibrate how you think about a productive workout.
02:51And here are two ways that we can do that.
02:54The two questions you should ask yourself the day after every session.
02:571.
02:58Did your numbers improve?
03:00Whatever your goal is in the gym, there are exercises that you're doing to specifically
03:04help you reach that goal.
03:06Focus on those exercises and watch how you're performing in them.
03:09If you're chasing a big strong chest, for example, you may build your routines and goals
03:13around the bench press.
03:14So if you've bench pressed more weight during this workout than you did last time, or you've
03:19done more reps during this last workout than you did last time, then you've had a good
03:23workout and you've pushed the bounds of your strength and you're setting yourself up for
03:25success.
03:27The other question you want to ask is 2.
03:28Do you feel fresh today?
03:30Because the truth is you should.
03:33You want to train just hard enough in every single workout to be able to hit your next
03:37workout feeling fresh.
03:38If you're constantly sore the day after you hit the gym, then you're subtly keeping yourself
03:42from lifting your heaviest weights and maximizing each set for muscle hypertrophy and strength
03:46building.
03:47So aim to go hard every session, but push to make sure that you feel fresh and recovered
03:51the next day.
03:52If you feel good the next day after a tough session, then you know next time in your workout
03:56you can push a little bit harder because maintaining that level of freshness is going to let you
04:00hit it hard today.
04:01None of that means though that soreness doesn't have a purpose, especially if you're at the
04:06beginning of your training journey.
04:07If you're a beginner, it can be very useful to feel certain kinds of soreness.
04:12The thing I never want you to feel is total body fatigue and soreness because that's what's
04:16going to hold you back from performing in your next workout.
04:19But soreness in specific muscle groups when it does not include pain can often signal
04:24that you're doing an exercise correctly.
04:27Let's take a biceps curl for example.
04:29If the day after you've done four sets of bicep curls you feel only soreness in your
04:33shoulders, there's a good chance that you didn't do those bicep curls correctly and
04:37you're going to want to work to dial in your form before going heavier and going harder.
04:41But if you feel those curls only in your biceps, then you're on the right track.
04:45Just remember that no matter what, the goal of a workout is not to get sore and soreness
04:50doesn't prove workout effectiveness at all.
04:53The only real proof of whether your workout is effective or not is whether you're getting
04:57the results you set out to achieve and those results should never be just muscle soreness.
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