Muscle Soreness - Do Sore Muscles Equal Muscle Building Results

It seems to be a wide spread fallacy that if you do not suffer from soreness the next day or 2 after training you have not trained hard enough and will not get results. This is absolutely not the case. There is a difference between overtraining soreness and delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS. The latter is not a negative but not necessary in order to show results. If you are sore after a workout for more than 2 days you probably are bordering on overtraining which is actually detrimental to your results and encouraging injury.

There is a fine line or training zone for hypertrophy which basically means lean muscle gains. Training outside of the ‘2-4 sets of 8-12 rep’ range is going to promote strength or muscular endurance. This specific range is your ideal range for muscle growth and should be used during your bulking or growth cycle. I mention ‘cycle’ because I always encourage my clients to cycle their training and when I am programming their workouts I always ensure they cycle on and off growth, blending in the strength or muscular endurance as needed according to the results being sought.

Strength is a good primer for hypertrophy especially if you are looking to be able to slowly increase weights used in the muscle gain ranges. While working in the muscle gain range you will want to choose enough weight to get your reps without being able to eek out one more rep. Finding this balance is hard and of course you will want to make your last sets so the weight may stay the same from set one to set 3 or 4 but seem to be tougher as you get near the end yet so that the first sets are not super easy. This comes with time, practice and experience but we all have to start somewhere.

You may feel more soreness after a power or strength workout which consists of reps from 6 or less but these are not ideal figures for muscle growth. Not wrong and great for prep toward hypertrophy so they do go in hand but best cycled. Max OT seems to be a popular program to try for strength gains and when I tried it I got exactly that by utilizing higher weight enabling me to lift a tad more later on during muscle growth.

Eventually the amount of weight you use for an exercise in hypertrophy will become lighter to you as you adapt, and the reps will go up into the muscular endurance phase which you cycle into as well. This means when you go back into the hypertrophy ranges you will be able to lift slightly more within that range showing adaptation. Of course soreness will happen and is normal but just don’t work toward soreness simply because it is your way to gauge growth, that is not correct thinking. Work toward completion of your sets and reps in the range of which you are seeking and count on that for the results sought.

By Linda Cusmano