Being Sore ≠ Good Workout

Have you ever judged how good your workout was by how much it hurt to sit on the toilet the next day??? Because same!

However, muscle soreness doesn’t mean we’ve had a good workout! In fact, excessive soreness can cause losses in things like athletic performance, power output, or cause us to take some extra time off, missing out on our following workouts.

There are a few main drivers of muscle soreness, some of them being a new stimulus, an increased range of motion, doing exercises slowly (focusing on the eccentric), or training infrequently, and thus not allowing your muscles to adapt to the provided stimulus.

A smart training program will likely still leave you a bit sore, but the fatigue should be much more manageable. Some ways that we can decrease the chance of excessive muscle soreness are by utilizing smart training techniques, such as programming similar workouts week to week for 4-6 weeks, focusing on progressive overload rather than consistently new stimuli. We should be aiming to increase load, sets/reps, range of motion, and/or time under tension within our training blocks, and spend time focusing on recovery with a big emphasis on sleep, nutrition, and stress management.

So, is soreness a good indicator of a good workout? Nope, not really! It’s actually more of an indicator of muscle damage rather than the effectiveness of your workout.