Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is the body’s response that causes sore muscles after working out. Muscle soreness after a workout is a completely normal reaction from the body. You may notice that DOMS is present after either new workout programs, heavy eccentric (muscle lengthening) exercise, or plyometrics (jumping and landings). DOMS shows up as anything from minor muscle discomfort to pain that stops you from living your normal life. Muscle soreness usually peaks about 2-3 days following exercise and lasts up to 7 days. The good news is that it doesn’t always happen and you can do things to limit its impact on your life.
What is DOMS?
DOMS is experienced as anything from acute muscle stiffness or soreness in the days after working out to pain that dramatically impacts your activities of daily living (Cheung, Hume, & Maxwell, 2003).
DOMS was first described in 1900 by Theodore Hough when he described the soreness following exercise as “fundamentally the result of ruptures within the muscle” (Hough, 1900). This sounds pretty dramatic, but even more, than 100 years ago Hough was onto something
DOMS is considered a type 1 muscle strain. When we work out, small amounts of muscle damage occur (muscle strain) and then our body repairs itself to be stronger than they were before.
The soreness in our muscles after a workout is a symptom of using muscles and stressing them to the point where they are damaged and need to repair themselves to be stronger later (Cheung et al., 2003).
When our body responds to stresses by making itself stronger, it is considered to be over-compensating. The body realizes the stresses on it are too much for the muscles to handle, and figures out this isn’t a good thing, so it builds excess muscle and strength so that next time it is better able to handle what we throw at it.
You want to make sure that the intensity and volume of work that you are doing match your goals. Muscles respond specifically to the stresses placed on them. If you want to learn more about how muscles respond to stress, check out my article on the SAID principle here.
However, if you are chronically sore and tired it might not be a good thing. That’s why you should know the signs of overreaching, and know when to implement deload weeks into your training.
Why are muscles sore after a workout?
DOMS usually shows up after you start a new workout program, start working out again after a long time off or do a workout with a lot of eccentric loading.
Eccentric loading or contractions are lowering portion of an exercise or when the muscle lengthens while contracting (i.e. the lowering portion of a squat, or the lowering portion of a biceps curl). Eccentric loads can also be high if you have to decelerate your body when doing exercises (i.e. running downhill or landing from jumping off a box).
When we do these types of workouts or exercises, the tension in our muscles is very high. This can cause very small tears in our muscle cells, which then causes the sensation of pain/discomfort that we feel as DOMS
What is happening in the muscle?
As mentioned above, DOMS is caused by damage to muscle cells after working out.
When we do high effort muscle contractions, the tension in the parts of the muscle that cause the contraction is extremely high. Due to this, the two main elements in the muscle cell that are responsible for contraction can be pulled apart from one another and/or damaged (Cheung et al., 2003).
Also, because of the high tension, the cell wall in our muscle cells can be damaged and that throws off the balance of the materials within the cells. This can prevent or slow down muscle cell contraction and mess with the ability of the muscle to contract (Cheung et al., 2003).
At the same time, because our muscles are contracting so hard (or trying to), there is a lot of strain on where our muscles switch over to tendons.
If you are like me, sometimes no matter how hard you contract your muscles they just can’t seem to lift a weight past a certain point. It’s like the barbell hit a brick wall. This is called a sticking point. If you are interested in learning more, I wrote an in-depth on some of the science of why sticking points happen.
All of this damage is called microtrauma and is necessary for our muscles to gain size because our body over-compensates by building our muscles to be bigger and stronger after this happens.
But if the damage in muscle cells is too much then there is a build-up of local swelling and inflammation in the muscle where the damage occurred. This puts pressure on the pain receptors in our muscles, which cause pain signals to go to our brain – and we feel DOMS.
Read More: Does exercise order matter in your workouts? A new review and meta-analysis was just published and I broke down the results to help you get the most out of your workouts. Check it out here.
Will I always get DOMS?
The good news is that your body is really good at adapting to stresses on it, so DOMS doesn’t show up after every workout – even if it’s a high eccentric effort.
This adaptation and increased tolerance to high muscle stresses is called the repeated bout effect.
After you perform a workout that you’re not used to and get sore, your body realizes that it wasn’t ready for the stress placed on it. The body goes into overdrive to over-compensate, so that next time it doesn’t have as much damage to the muscle.
This leads to less soreness, swelling and decreased performance the next time you complete the same workout. Every time you do the same workout you experience less DOMS and are recovered quicker.
As long as you perform the same or similar workout within a couple of weeks of the previous workout, your body’s ability to handle the stresses remains high. So, you won’t need to deal with the hardcore DOMS that you experience after your first time doing a workout.
But if you take a long time off doing workouts that originally caused DOMS (more than 2-3 weeks between workouts) then the DOMS will most likely return, and you’ll have to restart the sequence of building up a tolerance to the stresses.
How to relieve sore muscles after a workout
The key to getting rid of muscle soreness after working out is to increase blood flow to the muscles. Increasing blood flow increased the number of good nutrients that get to the damaged muscle cells and helps to flush away the chemicals and waste products that cause pain and soreness.
Research has shown that hot baths, saunas, massage or low-intensity activity (bike ride, swimming, going for a walk) can decrease muscle soreness after exercise.
Massage and Foam Rolling:
A recent research review article by Dupuy and colleagues found that massage was the most powerful tool/technique to decrease muscle soreness after working out.
The study showed that a 20-30 minute massage within 2 hours of a workout was the best way to decrease DOMS when the soreness/pain was evaluated 24 hours following exercise. Other studies have also shown that massage decreased feelings of DOMS 3 days after workouts too (2018).
Foam rolling, which is often considered a self-massage, is also a good tool to use to reduce feelings of DOMS after working out.
A study by Laffaye had people foam roll one leg for a few minutes, but not the other after a workout and measured markers of DOMS. The study found that the leg that was foam rolled had significantly decreased DOMS compared to the other leg. The authors concluded that foam rolling, even for short periods of time, is an effective technique to do after working out to decrease muscle soreness after a workout (Laffaye, Da Silva, & Delafontaine, 2019). Check out this great foam roller from Sportcheck.ca
Stretching:
Research shows that stretching has no positive effect on perceptions of DOMS after working out. Some studies even suggest that stretching may make DOMS worse – but the evidence is not strong.
If you’d like to learn more, I wrote a quick article on stretching before vs. after a workout. It dives into some of the research on the topic and how to structure a proper warm-up.
Compression Clothing:
Using compression clothes/leggings after workouts is a popular tool to decrease the feelings of DOMS after working out. They have received a lot of attention in the scientific community recently to see if they actually make a difference.
Research shows that compression garments have a positive impact on DOMS, but they aren’t as effective as massage.
Because DOMS is related to the amount of inflammation in muscles, it is thought that the compression clothes decrease the room for inflammation to happen so that decreases the pain/discomfort associated with DOMS (Dupuy et al., 2018).
Popular compression clothing includes: UnderArmour’s recovery line: Men’s & Women’s (link to UnderArmour website) and 2XU Recovery’s Line (2XU website)
Other Options:
Research has also shown that cold water immersion can also decrease feelings of DOMS, with the ideal water temperature being below 11 °C and the immersion time being 11-15 minutes (Dupuy et al., 2018)
Although I don’t recommend it, anti-inflammatory medicines can also be used to decrease pain if the pain is impacting your quality of life.
Ways to Prevent DOMS
There is no guaranteed way to prevent DOMS, but there are some suggestions to limit the intensity.
It really comes down to being smart when you exercise. You should not jump headfirst into a workout program or new type of workout by going as hard as possible during the first workout. Ideally, you will start new exercise programs gently and gradually by keeping workouts low in intensity and duration. This will give your body a chance to start to get used to the new stresses placed on it.
You also want to make sure your training matches your goals. To do this, you need to have an understanding of the interplay between sets, reps, intensity and how the body responds. I wrote an article on this topic, that you should check out if you write your own workouts.
Then over the course of weeks and months (and years), you continually increase the intensity, complexity and duration of your workouts so that you continually stress your body – but don’t overdo it to the point where you have debilitating DOMS.
Warming up may before a workout may decrease the intensity of DOMS, but the evidence for that is not very strong. There is no evidence in scientific research that stretching before or after exercise decreases DOMS – if you’re curious about stretching, check out my article on it here
References
Cheung, K., Hume, P. A., & Maxwell, L. (2003). Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness: Treatment Strategies and Performance Factors. Sports Medicine, 33(2), 145–164. https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-200333020-00005
Dupuy, O., Douzi, W., Theurot, D., Bosquet, L., & Dugué, B. (2018). An Evidence-Based Approach for Choosing Post-exercise Recovery Techniques to Reduce Markers of Muscle Damage, Soreness, Fatigue, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 403. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.00403
Hough, T. (1900). ERGOGRAPHIC STUDIES IN MUSCULAR SORENESS. J Boston Soc Med Sci, 5(3), 81–92.
Laffaye, G., Da Silva, D. T., & Delafontaine, A. (2019). Self-Myofascial Release Effect With Foam Rolling on Recovery After High-Intensity Interval Training. Frontiers in Physiology, 10, 1287. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.01287