Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). If you’ve ever trained at even a moderate intensity you have probably experienced DOMS to some extent.
Most of you reading have probably even experienced the type of DOMS that leaves you cursing every stair you have to climb and a few may have even got to the point where you can’t carry out daily tasks due to it.
Weirdly enough, listen to any group of fitness minded people for long enough you will inevitably hear them masochistically bragging about how they “struggled to sit on the toilet”.
I get it. I’ll be the first to admit that I myself am one of those masochists who gets a certain pleasure from being sore in the days after a workout. However, I don’t get particularly sore from workouts these days. I mean yeah, Romanian deadlifts are always going to make you feel like someone’s taken to your hamstrings with a knife but that’s due to it being an exercise that places peak tension in a stretched position.
But does this mean that my workouts are not effective?
Many trainers and trainees consider muscle soreness to be one of the best gauges of how effective a workout is, applying ye old adage of “no pain, no gain” literally.
But is this true? Is DOMS a valid indicator of muscular growth?
What exactly is DOMS?
It’s important to note before we start that research on DOMS is lacking with there still being much to uncover.
Currently, it’s believed that DOMS is related to muscle damage from exercise that we are not used to or accustomed to. This is pretty obvious, think about coming back to training after a lay-off. It hurts just thinking about it.
There are a number of theories that have been proposed to explain the cause of DOMS. Without delving to heavily into the science the main proposed mechanisms are:
1) Inflammation caused by microscopic tears in the connective tissue which result in pain receptors being more sensitive.
2) Neutrophils (a type of white blood cell) are attracted to the damaged site and in turn generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) which can cause further damage.
3) Oedema or swelling applies increased osmotic pressure within muscle fibres making pain receptors more sensitive.
So is it possible for DOMS to be a valid indicator of muscle growth?
To tie DOMS to muscle growth we’d need to establish that the theory has some plausibility. One possibility is the association between DOMS and exercise induced muscle damage (EIMD).
There is strong theoretical support suggesting that muscle damage is associated with muscle hypertrophy. A number of events may tie muscle damage to hypertrophy:
1) The acute inflammatory response to damage. Macrophages are believed to promote remodelling after damaging exercise by releasing myokines (a protein released from muscle cells which impact other cells) which have shown to have anabolic properties.
2) ROS have been shown to promote growth in smooth muscle and cardiac muscle and it’s been suggested that it may play a similar role in skeletal muscle.
3) Satellite cell activation is increased with muscle damage. These guys are fascinating. They are essentially like muscle stem cells, so when the muscle is stressed satellite cells create cells called myoblasts which fuse to existing muscle cells and help them to re-build. They can also donate their nuclei to existing muscle fibres to boost muscle protein synthesis. However, (you must be getting tired of me saying that) some research has shown that they respond to non-damaging exercise as well and at this point it’s unclear whether their activity is increased more with damaging exercise.
4) Cell swelling may also stimulate anabolism via increased MPS and decreased protein breakdown.
We must remember that the above is theoretical research meaning that there has been no direct research showing that EIMD directly causes muscle growth. What has been shown is that muscle damage is not needed for muscle growth.
So any benefits of muscle damage to growth would be additive rather than a must have. Meaning you don’t have to annihilate your muscles in order to stimulate growth.
In fact, it may be detrimental. Excessive muscle damage has a negative effect on performance and recovery, with severe damage reducing force production by 50% or more!
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this would lead to reduced training intensity which would effect muscle growth.
What we can take away from the above research is that muscle damage may enhance muscle growth but the research is far from conclusive and that if it does play a role there is likely to be a sweet spot between mild to moderate damage.
So we know what DOMS is and that it may be associated with muscle damage which in turn may play a role in muscle growth…
Lots of maybes right?
But is there any research to show that DOMS indicates muscle growth?
Unfortunately, current evidence gives reason to be sceptical.
1) Firstly, we don’t know whether DOMS is an accurate gauge of muscle damage. It may be a by-product, however studies have shown that soreness is actually poorly correlated with both how long and the magnitude of muscle damage markers, including range of motion, isometric strength and certain blood measurements.
2) MRI has also shown that swelling does not fit with soreness, meaning that pain peaks before swelling is apparent.
3) We can experience DOMS without inflammation which as stated earlier was one of the major theories linking muscle damage and hypertrophy.
4) We can also look at the fact that some forms of exercise such as endurance running and cycling, which aren’t generally associated with significant hypertrophy, can cause DOMS.
5) Bodybuilders will typically have body parts that tend to suffer from worse DOMs and others that are rarely sore. Yet, are the body parts that are consistently affected by DOMS larger than the rest of their muscles? Not usually, and from anecdotal experience if this were true I’d be sporting a pair of killer hams by now.
What this means for you:
You’re probably picking up a familiar vibe if you’re reading a lot of my articles. That it is rarely a simple yes or no answer. Most answers will fall into the grey area between.
In this instance we can say that there is not enough evidence to advise pursuing extreme DOMS in order to grow. In fact, training with the goal of waking up feeling like a tin man is likely to interfere with future training.
However, we can’t rule out that muscle damage may play a role in muscle growth so my advice would be to apply exercises and training techniques such as loaded eccentrics, super slow eccentrics etc. to a limited degree towards the end of mesocycle or sparingly. So if you feel the urge to go all out for a short period with the aim of annihilating the muscle that’s fine but it’s probably a smart move to follow that with a deload week.
Focus on progressive overload and increasing volume over time. These are proven gauges of muscle hypertrophy and strength and are easier to track. I can guarantee that if you’re getting stronger, doing more total volume and consuming adequate calories and protein then you’ll be growing. The same can’t be said for training for DOMS.
References
1 Schoenfeld BJ. Does exercise-induced muscle damage play a role in skeletal muscle hypertrophy?. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. 2012 May 1;26(5):1441-53.
2 Malm C. Exercise‐induced muscle damage and inflammation: fact or fiction?. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica. 2001 Mar 1;171(3):233-9.
3 Proske U, Morgan DL. Muscle damage from eccentric exercise: mechanism, mechanical signs, adaptation and clinical applications. The Journal of physiology. 2001 Dec 1;537(2):333-45.
4 Clarkson PM, Hubal MJ. Exercise-induced muscle damage in humans. American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation. 2002 Nov 1;81(11):S52-69.
5 Tidball JG. Inflammatory processes in muscle injury and repair. American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. 2005 Feb 1;288(2):R345-53.
6 Nielsen AR, Pedersen BK. The biological roles of exercise-induced cytokines: IL-6, IL-8, and IL-15. Applied physiology, nutrition, and metabolism. 2007 Aug 14;32(5):833-9.
7 Paulsen G, Mikkelsen UR, Raastad T, Peake JM. Leucocytes, cytokines and satellite cells. Exercise Immunology Review. 2012.