If you're basing the quality of your workouts on the DOMS you experience the day after, you're making a mistake. Or are you? There are plenty of camps that would have you believe that's true. But for all the anti-DOMS sentiment out there, we still can't seem to make up our minds. Let's look at some common myths flying around about muscle soreness.
'DOMS happen because you tear your muscle fibres during training'
This belief became widely accepted as the driver of muscle growth back in the day. That training causes micro-tears in the muscle that result in soreness and also drives muscle growth. In reality, DOMS is usually caused by intense bouts of exercise, often exercise that we're not accustomed to. The novelty and intensity of exercise causes micro-damage (not tears) that we perceive as soreness the next day or days. This soreness doesn't automatically mean that we're growing muscle. Why? Let me give you an example: If you had never done any painting, and now had to paint the ceiling of your house and it took you 5 hours, your shoulder and forearms would get sore. Would the soreness of 5 hours of painting magically grow your forearms and delts? Of course not. It was a novel movement, and you did it for 5 hours. Soreness in this case doesn't equal muscle growth.
A similar thing happens during the first week of a new training programme. You'll likely feel sore all over, and after workouts the next week, that soreness is gone. Training intensity is rarely so high as to be near your limits in week 1, but the novelty of the movements and tempos result in soreness. Again, soreness in this case doesn't immediately equal muscle growth.
Ignoring muscle soreness entirely?
Even though DOMS may not cause muscle growth, we shouldn't disregard them completely in training. Anytime you hear someone say "Don't equate muscle soreness with a good workout", take that with a pinch of salt. This is where theory can only take you so far. One thing that everyone can agree on when it comes to muscle growth is the need for hard training. Hard training ticks 2 boxes concerning the causes of DOMS. One of those is "intense bouts of exercise". The other is novelty. Hang on, you might be wondering how it ticks the novelty box after week 1 of a programme? Progressive overload happens as a result of exposing muscles to greater stimulus each time. You could argue that the novelty comes from our muscles responding and adapting to the new, greater stimulus that's needed to create change.
Okay, so the 'novelty from greater stimulus' might be a little bit of hair-splitting. After all, when we discuss novelty, it's usually to describe unfamiliar or new exercises. Or exercises that have been reintroduced after a long enough period that our bodies have become desensitised to them. But since our bodies are quite comfortable staying the same (homeostasis), and they need a big enough stimulus to force them to change, couldn't we say that each change-invoking stimulus is new?
Consistently getting DOMS weekly
I don't know about you, but whenever I push my sets to RPE 9 or 1 RIR, I get some soreness the following day. Periodically, when sets are taken to failure, I get worse DOMS. As a baseline, I push my sets to 1 RIR each week, because that's about the minimum (1-2 RIR) that is recommended when muscle growth is the goal. Given that 1 RIR usually results in DOMS, it now becomes at least a somewhat useful metric for assessing muscle growth. When it's a constant each week on a repeatable programme that strives to increase workload, it's probably a decent indicator that you're training hard enough to justify growing muscle. It's rare for anyone not to be at least a little sore every week if they're training hard and seeing consistent progress.
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