Hypertrophy, explained · Lesson 8
Do you need to get sore after a workout to build muscle?
No. Soreness, the pain the day after a session, doesn’t build muscle: with the same total work, volunteers who didn’t get sore gained just as much muscle and strength as those who did. It comes mostly from new effort where your muscle brakes while lengthening, and it fades as your muscle gets used to it, without your muscle ever stopping growing.
Where does muscle soreness come from?
Soreness is the pain and stiffness the day after an unaccustomed effort. It comes mostly from the eccentric phase, when your muscle brakes while lengthening, like your quads on the way down in a squat: that braking slightly damages its fibers (Proske and Morgan, 2001).
The pain likely comes from nerves made sensitive by factors the fibers produce: in rats, it even appeared without visible muscle damage (Mizumura and Taguchi, 2016). It isn’t lactic acid: lactic acid rose when running on the flat, which caused no soreness, and didn’t rise when running downhill, which did (Schwane et al., 1983).
Why does it hurt less the next time?
One session protects the same muscle: a second bout of the same kind, a week later, damages it much less (Proske and Morgan, 2001; McHugh, 2003). In 35 students, after an eccentric bout for the elbow flexors, a second session 6 months later still brought less soreness; at 12 months, that protection was gone (Nosaka et al., 2001).
While sore, your muscle is also weaker: its strength drops after the effort (Proske and Morgan, 2001; Cheung et al., 2003). And pain poorly reflects how much damage there is: in 110 students, it was weakly or not at all linked to the other markers (Nosaka et al., 2002).
Do you need pain to grow?
In 10 young men starting ten weeks of lifting, researchers sampled a bit of their thigh at the start, at 3 and at 10 weeks. In the first week, damage and protein building were at their highest, but that building had no link to growth; by 3 weeks, the damage had dropped, and building closely tracked growth. Fibers had grown measurably only by week 10 (Damas et al., 2016). For the authors, those first proteins likely go mostly to repair (Damas et al., 2018).
Another trial, on an eccentric bike, where you resist pedals that move backward: one group started all at once, with more than five times more damage markers in the blood and soreness; the other ramped up over three weeks, with no sign of damage. For the same total work, over eight weeks, muscle size grew just as much, and so did strength: +25% and +26% (Flann et al., 2011). A review concludes that damage is not what drives growth (Damas et al., 2018).
How do you come back without brutal soreness?
New exercise or coming back from a break? Start with few hard sets, then add more over two or three weeks. In the eccentric bike trial, ramping up over three weeks left no sign of damage (Flann et al., 2011), and a review advises introducing eccentric or new efforts gradually, over one to two weeks (Cheung et al., 2003).
People say: no soreness, no progress. No longer sore? Your muscle got used to it, it didn’t stop growing: at 10 weeks, damage was minimal and the fibers were bigger (Damas et al., 2016).
Your workout plan, built for your body.
In Tekio, your quads’ recovery drops after your sets, and you adjust it to how you feel.
Sources
Studies checked in PubMed. Measured muscle activity isn’t growth: each fact keeps its study’s population and limits.
- Proske U, Morgan DL (2001). Muscle damage from eccentric exercise: mechanism, mechanical signs, adaptation and clinical applications. J Physiol 537(Pt 2):333-45. PubMed · DOI
- Mizumura K, Taguchi T (2016). Delayed onset muscle soreness: Involvement of neurotrophic factors. J Physiol Sci 66(1):43-52. PubMed · DOI
- Schwane JA, Watrous BG, Johnson SR, et al. (1983). Is Lactic Acid Related to Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness? Phys Sportsmed 11(3):124-31. PubMed · DOI
- McHugh MP (2003). Recent advances in the understanding of the repeated bout effect: the protective effect against muscle damage from a single bout of eccentric exercise. Scand J Med Sci Sports 13(2):88-97. PubMed · DOI
- Nosaka K, Sakamoto K, Newton M, et al. (2001). How long does the protective effect on eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage last? Med Sci Sports Exerc 33(9):1490-5. PubMed · DOI
- Cheung K, Hume P, Maxwell L (2003). Delayed onset muscle soreness : treatment strategies and performance factors. Sports Med 33(2):145-64. PubMed · DOI
- Nosaka K, Newton M, Sacco P (2002). Delayed-onset muscle soreness does not reflect the magnitude of eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage. Scand J Med Sci Sports 12(6):337-46. PubMed · DOI
- Damas F, Phillips SM, Libardi CA, et al. (2016). Resistance training-induced changes in integrated myofibrillar protein synthesis are related to hypertrophy only after attenuation of muscle damage. J Physiol 594(18):5209-22. PubMed · DOI
- Damas F, Libardi CA, Ugrinowitsch C (2018). The development of skeletal muscle hypertrophy through resistance training: the role of muscle damage and muscle protein synthesis. Eur J Appl Physiol 118(3):485-500. PubMed · DOI
- Flann KL, LaStayo PC, McClain DA, et al. (2011). Muscle damage and muscle remodeling: no pain, no gain? J Exp Biol 214(Pt 4):674-9. PubMed · DOI
These lessons inform; they don’t replace advice from a health professional.