After participating in some kind of intense physical exercise, in particular something totally new to your body, it is common to get muscle soreness.
Fitness experts talk about the progressively increasing discomfort that develops between 1-2 days following activity as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and it's completely normal.
This type of muscle pain isn't the same as the pain or fatigue you feel during a workout. The delayed muscle soreness of DOMS is often at its most severe within the first 2 days after a new, rigorous activity and slowly but surely subsides over the next few days.
It's a common belief among a lot of people that sore muscles after a workout are indicative that you've activated lean muscle growth, and that more soreness will translate into faster muscle growth.
But are both of them really linked? What does muscle soreness have to do with muscle growth? Can you still build muscle while not getting stiff and sore?
In a recent study, experts took a group of subjects and separated them into a couple of groups.
The first group, referred to as the pre-trained group, prevented damage to their muscles by gradually "ramping up" their training over a 3-week period.
Group 2, on other hand, dived right into the intense workout routines.
The two groups took part in an eight-week exercise routine (20 minutes, 3 times each week)
During the research, scientists measured signs of muscle damage, muscle soreness, together with gains in size and strength.
Signs of muscle damage, absent in the pre-trained group, ended up in excess of five times higher in group two.
Self-reported muscle soreness, as you might imagine considering the amount of muscle damage, was also higher in the 2nd group.
However, and here's what's interesting, gains in muscle size and strength were pretty much the same between the 2 sets of subjects.
Preceding research has shown that the cause of DOMS after a training session is the connective tissue that helps to bind muscle fibers together, rather than the actual muscle fibers themselves.
Furthermore the feeling of muscle soreness looks like it's attributable to changes in the chemical environment surrounding muscle tissue instead of injury to the muscle cell itself.
In other words, the fact that you're not sore isn't going to mean your muscles aren't getting bigger. Likewise, sore muscles don't automatically translate into speedier growth.
Muscle soreness is simply a sign that you altered a variable in your training program, did an activity that your body wasn't accustomed to, or did a movement that just happens to trigger more soreness than others.
Will stretching eradicate muscle soreness?
Stretching before or immediately after exercise is unable to decrease delayed-onset muscle soreness.
When a group of experts analyzed a number of muscle soreness research, they learned that stretching after training led to an average decrease in post-exercise ache of only 2% – a consequence that's very likely to be of virtually no functional relevance for most of us.
DOMS has to do with microscopic damage to individual muscle fibers as well as the resulting recovery process. As soon as those muscle fibers are damaged, no level of post-training stretching can magically get rid of that damage.
