Stress & Adaptation Pt. 5

Soreness has a reputation it hasn't entirely earned.

The assumption runs deep, especially among newer athletes: if you're sore, the session was effective. If not, you left something on the table. While intuitive. It is mostly wrong.

Consider long-distance running. You will experience a meaningful delayed onset muscle soreness, yet this style of training produces little growth. The soreness is real. But muscle growth is insignificant. If soreness were a reliable signal of growth, this shouldn't be the case, yet it is, which tells you something meaningful about what soreness actually measures.

Novices complicate the picture further, as they tend to encounter the most palpable soreness, while also growing the most rapidly, which makes it easy to assume cause and effect. But soreness in a beginner is a reaction to them encountering a novel stimulus, not a sign of adaptation. Of course, they 'Feel It'.

As the body adapts, the soreness fades, but growth continues. So, the two were never as coupled as they appeared. 

The more pertinent observation is what soreness costs you. Significant soreness can alter motor recruitment patterns in subsequent sessions, meaning the muscles you intend to train may not be activating the way you want them to, and in some cases can cause force output to drop by as much as fifty percent. This is not training around pain, but patterning a dysfunctional way of movement, which has its own downstream effects on long-term progress.

So, while training sore does not seem to exacerbate the damage, it does seem to hinder the recovery process itself. This is most likely to occur when someone with no training experience is thrown into a program designed for someone who has been at this for years.

The lesson is not to avoid soreness. It is to stop mistaking it for progress.

Soreness is a tax, not a dividend. Manage it accordingly.