How Sore Should You Be After You Work Out?

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Feeling sore after the gym is strangely satisfying, as anyone who has found themselves prodding at their tender quads or announcing “I’m sooooo sore” to anyone who will listen can attest. (It’s okay, we’ve all done it.) So, naturally, you may assume that if you’re not sore after your workout, it was a flop. But you don’t necessarily need to hit the gym harder next time— and you really shouldn’t be struggling to wash your hair in the shower after a heavy shoulder day.

Delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, is a symptom that happens after damage to muscle tissue, says Brad Schoenfeld, PhD, CSCS, professor of exercise science at Lehman College. It feels like “palpable muscle soreness in the muscle bellies that hurts to touch, and most likely to move,” says John Rusin, DPT, physical therapist, personal trainer, and founder of Pain Free Performance. Usually, you’ll start feeling it about 24 hours after exercise and it can last up to 72 hours.

While the jury is still out on why exactly DOMS happens, Schoenfeld says that it may be a survival mechanism. “You’re challenging your body beyond its present state, which causes an adaptation. We can hypothesize that when there's some type of mild damage, the body wants to prevent that,” he says. “So it's going to try to get stronger and reinforce its structure to prevent this from happening in the future.”

It is most commonly associated with eccentric movements (the phase where the muscle lengthens, like when lowering a dumbbell during a bicep curl). But people can experience DOMS after performing any novel exercise or movement. “Are you doing a brand new exercise you've never done? That will lead to soreness due to basically insulting tissues that haven't been insulted that way before in a whole new, different way,” says Rusin. This could be a new exercise entirely (like adding bulgarian split squats instead of standard squats) or it could be chasing a new range of motion (like subbing in “ass-to-grass” squats).

You could also get sore after increasing your intensity of volume. “Intensity is how hard or heavy you are training,” says Rusin, “While volume is how much work you are doing. We could look at it as like a rep by rep standpoint or a set by set standpoint.” However, Schoenfeld notes that soreness doesn’t express the same way in everybody: Some people are more prone to getting DOMS, and others, less so—possibly due to genetics.

Both experts agree that you shouldn’t be using soreness as an exercise goal or sign of progress. But DOMS has been positively correlated with muscle hypertrophy. “I think that if you do experience a little mild soreness, it may be a good indicator of growth,” says Schoenfeld. However, you don’t need to be sore to develop your muscles. When Rusin creates a training block with four to six weeks of the same weekly exercises, he tends to see that people get stronger and less sore at the same time.

It’s also really easy to overdo your training if your goal is to get sore. “I know some people chase soreness and they walk out of the gym like Frankenstein. They can't move their arms and their legs are stiff and they think they've really made great gains,” says Schoenfeld. “That is not the case. If anything, that would have negative effects simply because it disrupts your ability to continue training properly and if you're not training properly you're not you're not growing.” If you’re too sore, you also risk injury during your next workout because you may not be moving through your full range of motion or could compensate with other muscles.

Some people can expect to feel a little sore (emphasis on little here) after every training session, but “the vast majority of people do not get sore simply by increasing weight,” says Schoenfeld. When Schoenfeld and his team performed a study on resistance-trained individuals (people with a minimum of one year of training), almost everyone gets sore at the beginning of the study because they’re exposed to a new stimulus and routine. Each session, they increased the weight of the lifts. “By the end of the study, virtually all of them—I mean literally 99 percent—report no soreness at all.”

You may want to think of soreness on a scale of one to 10, says Rusin. One or two would be a mild soreness. If you touched your muscle, you’d be able to feel it a little, says Schoenfeld, but it certainly won’t take away from your daily living. When you start to go over four—like five to seven—your movement system has been impacted. “I am moving differently because it hurts to move. It not only hurts to touch, but when I do something like walking down a flight of stairs, up a flight of stairs, going down to the toilet, you're like, man, I overdid it yesterday,” says Rusin.

When you get into the severe soreness range, like an eight to 10, things get spicy. Rusin explains that this level—something that leaves you so debilitated that you can’t think about exercising for a week—could be a sign of mild rhabdomyolysis.

The window that we ideally want to stay under is a four, anywhere from 24 to 36 hours after your workout, says Rusin. “That allows us to become recoverable before the next time we go into train. Something that we don't want to do is compound soreness when you're going into your next session training similar muscle groups or movement patterns when you're not recovered from the session before.”

While a little mild soreness is nothing to worry about, you should try to prevent that debilitating soreness that will leave you wincing every time you sit down on the toilet.

First, if you’re just getting back into a workout routine, proceed cautiously. “Stay well short of muscle failure in the first few weeks if you’re coming back after a layoff,” says Schoenfeld. You should monitor your volume and intensity, and choose exercises that you’re confident and competent in, says Rusin. Once you’ve had a few weeks of training under your belt, avoid introducing new movements too often. Despite what Instagram shows you, “you should not be doing a new workout every single day you walk into the gym,” says Rusin. “Four week programs are what I personally use with a vast majority of my clients.”

Warming up and cooling down are also essential. “The big variables in muscle soreness or delayed onset muscle soreness are going to overall be your preparation and recovery,” says Rusin. Take 10 to 15 minutes to warm up and at least five to stretch and breathe at the end of your workout.

Want some other signs that you’re making progress in the gym? Here are a few

• You can do more reps than last time
• You can lift heavier weight at the same rep range
• You increase your weekly training volume (think 4 days instead of 3)
• You feel confident in your body
• Your energy levels have increased

The most important, though? You find yourself excited to train, rather than dreading it, signifying that “you’re getting on the path of habituation for your training and for your lifestyle,” says Rusin.

Basically, the undefeated champion is consistency. You need to train frequently enough to build muscle, strength, and motor skills. “But it's really hard to train enough if you're always sore and you have to sit on the couch and do nothing for four or five days between sessions,” says Rusin. “Your relationship with exercise will be really dysfunctional if every time you go into the gym, you get battered. What kind of relationship is that? It takes a lot from you, it doesn't give you anything and then you're more likely to end up back on the couch doing nothing.”