Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I build Evolo. Evolo is science-backed strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evolo now for two weeks free if you visit evolofitness.com. Welcome to Fitness Rewired on the Dr. Shannon Show, a nine-episode capsule designed to close the gap between fitness culture and exercise science so you can see higher return on your effort and finally feel like you're doing enough. Many fitness beliefs come from marketing and tradition and don't align with current evidence. When you learn the truth, you can rewire your thoughts around fitness. That shift leads to higher quality actions, better results, and health you can actually sustain. I'm your host, Shannon Richie. Welcome to the show. We typically think an effective workout is one that makes us soar, and if you're not sore, you didn't work hard enough. Great news, you do not have to be sore to see results. And in fact, light to no muscle soreness may actually be ideal. This is very freeing because although being sore is satisfying, it is uncomfortable. So when you understand that you don't need to chase soreness, you tend to feel more comfortable while also seeing better results. So what is soreness? Soreness or delayed onset muscle soreness, DOMS is what they call it in the literature, is tenderness and stiffness that you feel 12 to 72 hours after a workout. People think soreness happens when the muscle is torn or damaged, but DOMS is not simply your muscle being torn or damaged, even though that's often how it's described. While hard or new exercise can cause small amounts of structural disruption inside the muscle fibers, soreness itself is now understood to come mainly from temporary inflammatory response and sensitization of pain receptors in the muscle, primarily within connective tissue like fascia. So studies show that markers of muscle damage do not consistently match how sore someone feels. Soreness typically happens when you do a new movement or if you have a heavy eccentric component to the exercise. So eccentrics means like the lowering phase of an exercise, like the lowering phase of a bicep curl, or if you add lots of volume or range of motion. But soreness is not proof that muscle fibers were damaged in any way. Another common belief that's adjacent to this was, does muscle damage mean that you're going to build muscle? Contrary to popular belief, muscle damage does not necessarily mean you will build more muscle. Muscle damage is not required to build muscle. While early theories suggested microscopic damage triggered growth, so your muscle kind of tears and that's what triggers growth. And even I was taught this years ago, more research shows that muscle growth is primarily driven by mechanical tension and high muscle fiber recruitment, not by how much structural damage occurs, not because the muscle is more torn. In fact, excessive damage can actually slow progress because it reduces force output in your next workout, it delays recovery, and can limit your training quality in subsequent sessions. All which matter a lot more for long-term hypertrophy or muscle growth. Damage can sometimes occur alongside an effective training, especially when the stimulus is new, but it's more of a byproduct than a driver of muscle growth. So if soreness doesn't necessarily come from muscle damage and muscle damage doesn't necessarily create muscle growth, do we need to be sore at all? The truth is, no, you do not need to be sore to build muscle. Hypertrophy or muscle growth is, again, primarily driven by mechanical tension and recruiting muscle fibers close enough to failure, not by soreness or muscle damage. And research consistently shows that muscle growth can continue even as soreness decreases with repeated training. This happens because of something called the repeated bout effect. Your body grows accustomed to a certain stimulus and you start to recover better from it and get less sore over time. Progressive overload is key for results, doing similar movement patterns and just adding weight or reps to those movement patterns over time. If you're switching it up constantly, your body doesn't actually change. This whole muscle confusion thing is not really aligned with how your body adapts and changes. By switching it up constantly, that will make you more sore. So people think that because they're sore from switching it up, they're seeing better results. So that's kind of debunking two myths in one. Number one, that you have to switch up your workouts and number two, that soreness is a indicator that you had an effective workout. In fact, a sign of a well-designed program is that you'll get less sore the more consistent you are. But what if you didn't do something new and you still got sore? So a new stimulus or a novel stimulus is the most common cause of soreness. You do a new workout and your body is sore the next day or maybe two days later. Dom's can also occur when you increase eccentric loading. So like the lowering phase, one of the movements that tend to cause soreness in our program is our matrix move. It's our kind of quad move where we lean our body back. It's called reverse Nordic curl. And because there's a heavy eccentric component of that exercise, it tends to cause more soreness. You can also get sore from significantly raising your training volume or significantly training closer to failure more than you're used to. If you're training muscles at longer lengths or through a larger range of motion, if you're returning to training after some time off, or if you're accumulating more overall fatigue than your tissues are used to. Even familiar exercises can make you sore if you suddenly go heavier or add reps or sets. If you do slower tempos, change technique, or reduce recovery between sessions. So soreness does happen, but it shouldn't feel constant or extreme. I personally rarely get sore, but I've built muscle and changed my body composition. Can soreness be counterproductive? Yes, soreness can become counterproductive because muscle growth happens when you consistently expose it to high degrees and mechanical tension, not from overly intense sessions. So when soreness blocks your ability to train the muscle again with high effort, it starts to become counterproductive. So excessive soreness is not only not required, it can actually prolong recovery and lowers the total training volume and frequency, which are really prime drivers of results. So there is an optimal level of soreness. And I would say mild to no soreness is ideal. Some light soreness that doesn't limit performance or range of motion is fine. While soreness that lasts several days or changes how you move, or you're so sore that you feel like you can't stand up or go down the stairs or prevents you from training next time, means that you just hit it a little too hard. Again, that happens to me every once in a while, but we don't wanna chase that type of soreness. What if you are sore? Should you train a sore muscle? So you can train through mild soreness, but you generally shouldn't push hard through moderate or severe soreness. Again, the type of soreness that you can't go down the stairs because your legs are sore, that probably means you need an extra recovery day. This is because soreness temporarily reduces force production, coordination and range of motion, which can lower training quality and increase injury risk. But if light soreness doesn't change how you move or it doesn't limit performance, you can continue to train a muscle that is lightly sore. Sometimes you don't know if your soreness will alter your technique until you start your workout. Sometimes you start to train and you feel better and sometimes you quickly realize your output or form is very limited by soreness, in which case you can just skip working that specific muscle group. But working a muscle group that's sore doesn't necessarily compound the soreness. What matters is that you're giving each muscle group around 48 hours to recover, so you don't wanna work the same muscle group two days in a row. But if a muscle is still sore after that 48-ish hour period, you can train it again. So just to summarize, don't worry about soreness. It doesn't mean that you had a good workout, but it also isn't something to be afraid of. Soreness will happen when you first start a new program, but it should start to get better. Light to know muscle soreness is ideal so that you can train frequently with high performance. Tomorrow we're talking all about sweating and hot workouts. We'll see you then.
