Is Soreness a Sign of a Good Workout?

There is a general belief that being sore is a good indicator of a “successful” workout. But is this true?

The short answer? No.

But before I get into why, I’ll be the first to admit that I like feeling some muscle soreness the day after a workout. It’s satisfying (in a strange, masochistic sort of way) and lets you know you at least “did” something during the session. But back to the question.

Feeling sore after a workout doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good workout. It just means you’re sore, and your muscles were not accustomed to whatever new or intense activity you put them through.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—soreness is an inevitable part of training and a sign you’re challenging yourself in workouts. But soreness shouldn’t be your only criteria for gauging the effectiveness of a workout. In fact, chasing soreness every session is not only a recipe for injury and burnout, but it will likely sabotage your progress in other areas as well.

There is a misconception out there that exercise is hard and you should feel exhausted after every workout. I often see this with newer lifters who expect to be sore after workouts, and feel like they are not working hard enough or getting their money’s worth if that doesn’t happen.

This might be surprising, but one of my goals when I begin working with a new client is for them to tell me that their workout wasn’t too hard and they felt little to no soreness after. In fact, I actually feel like I failed if after our first session they complain about being sore for days on end and had trouble walking and doing other exercise or activities. This is just my opinion, but if your only goal with exercise is to work hard and be sore, then I don’t think you need to pay me or any other coach to experience that. Soreness is easy. Just do walking lunges for 30 minutes straight and tell me how fun stairs are tomorrow.

Instead of getting so hung up on soreness, I try to make new clients aware of other ways to gauge the effectiveness of their workouts and the progress they’re making in and out of the gym. Some of these are objective, like lifting more reps, increasing the weight on the bar, or seeing the scale moving in the right direction. Others are subjective, like feeling more comfortable and confident in the gym, lower perceived exertion with physical activities, and improved quality of life. I would even argue that the fact you’re not getting sore every workout is a good indicator of progress, because it shows that your body is successfully adapting the stress being applied to it.

But sometimes soreness provides valuable information for both the coach and the client. For example, muscle soreness is a piece of feedback that lets you know whether the muscles you targeted with a certain exercise were actually worked. This can apply to someone completely new to exercise or even a more experienced lifter doing a new or harder variation of an exercise for the first time.

Take someone learning the deadlift. If the next day their low back and quads were sore (instead of their hamstrings and glutes), then this would tell me something is off in their execution of the movement and we’ll have to adjust their form in some way. If after some corrections in the next session they feel soreness in their glutes and hamstrings, then we know they’re performing the movement more optimally.

So, I would say that experiencing a high level of muscle soreness is probably normal and acceptable (1) when just starting strength training for the first time or after an extended layoff, and (2) when learning a new exercise. Still, in neither instance should you be incapacitated for days afterward, and soreness should never be the main thing you chase in your training.