"No Pain, No Gain" Taken Literally
Many lifters treat delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) as proof that a session was productive, and its absence as a sign a workout wasn't hard enough to drive muscle growth.
Soreness and Growth Are Not the Same Signal
A detailed review of the mechanisms underlying resistance-training hypertrophy found that muscle damage — the process most directly responsible for soreness — is neither necessary nor sufficient on its own to drive muscle growth; mechanical tension and metabolic stress, which can occur with or without significant muscle damage, are considered the primary drivers of hypertrophic adaptation (Damas, Libardi & Ugrinowitsch, 2018). In fact, excessive muscle damage can temporarily impair the muscle protein synthesis response, meaning more soreness is not simply "more growth."
Why Chasing Soreness Is a Poor Training Strategy
As lifters become more trained, their muscles typically become more resistant to damage from a given stimulus — soreness naturally diminishes over time even as training continues to drive genuine strength and size gains. Using soreness as the primary marker of a "good" session is therefore an unreliable guide, and can even encourage counterproductively excessive training loads.
References & Further Reading
- Damas F, Libardi CA, Ugrinowitsch C. The development of skeletal muscle hypertrophy through resistance training: the role of muscle damage and muscle protein synthesis. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2018;118(3):485-500.