Ask the Trainer: Are You Sore After a Workout?

Q: Should I feel sore after every workout?

A: No. First, let’s look at the idea of exercise-related pain from a broader view.

There are actually several aspects to this phenomenon. Let’s first deal with and then put aside pre-workout discomfort. Is it an unpleasant thought to consider working out before you actually start? That could be because you’re just getting started and your body is still adjusting to the rigors of regular training. The physical part of that gets easier with consistency and as the body adapts to the process of consistent challenge. It could also be that you just don’t enjoy movement that puts significant stress on your body or makes you get out of breath or sweaty. That’s more of a mental function you have to address, weighing the costs and benefits to decide the intrinsic worth of fitness to your overall quality of life.

Then there’s the pain during exercise. What’s good and what’s bad? Lungs burning slightly with your heart thumping twice as fast as it does at rest is fine. Feeling light-headed or nauseated is not. Gradually losing muscle power as stress, a burning sensation and tightness evenly distributed over the length of the burdened muscle group all build up is great. Sharp, debilitating joint or connective tissue pain is very bad.

So let’s talk about the pain after the workout. What kind and how much is ok, or even beneficial?

As mentioned above, any joint, ligament (bone-to-bone connective tissue) or tendon (muscle-to-bone connective tissue) pain is a medical concern and cause to discontinue training immediately until it is diagnosed by a physician. That holds for back, neck and head pain as well, as should be obvious.

But shouldn’t you feel at least a little bit sore after strength training workouts?

Not necessarily.

It’s important to understand that light-to-moderate muscle soreness can be a result of a new level of difficulty in resistance training, such as moving up in weight or adding a set. But it can also be from changing exercises or sequencing and thereby experiencing different physics than the body is accustomed to already. Legs that are used to squats or lunges may be quite tight and sore the day after substituting dead lifts (bending at the waist but not the knee as with squats) and quad extensions (raising the shins against a weighted, padded surface from a flexed to fully extended position).

The key is to know what you’re trying to accomplish, and then how to make that happen. I start clients with manageable loads so they can focus on strict form and control. As they develop this skill, we increase a combination of volume, load and movement variations to keep functionally applicable strength and muscle endurance capacities improving until we reach maintenance levels. At this point, which is where I am personally, significant full-body soreness after a strength workout is rare.

The better measure of the efficacy of your resistance training over time is whether you are accomplishing your growth or maintenance goals.

So, are you?