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After engaging in some sort of arduous physical exercise, especially something totally new to your body, it is not uncommon to develop sore muscles.

Exercise physiologists talk about the gradually escalating discomfort that occurs between 1-2 days after activity as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and it is perfectly normal.

This sort of muscle ache is not the same as the pain or fatigue you feel during exercise. The delayed muscle soreness of DOMS is often at its worst in the first couple of days after a new, rigorous activity and gradually subsides within the next few days.

It’s a common belief among lots of people that sore muscles after a workout are indicative that you’ve triggered muscle growth, and that more soreness means more rapid muscle growth.

But are both of them genuinely linked? Just what does muscle soreness have to do with muscle growth? Can you still gain muscle while not feeling sore?

In a recent study, scientists got a group of subjects and separated them into 2 groups.

The first group, called the pre-trained group, avoided damage to their muscles by gradually “ramping up” their training over a three-week period.

The second group, on other hand, jumped straight into the intensive workouts.

Both groups took part in an eight-week exercise program (twenty minutes, 3 times each week)

During the investigation, scientists measured indications of muscle damage, muscle soreness, in addition to gains in size and strength.

Signs of muscle damage, lacking in the pre-trained group, were more than five times higher in group two.

Self-reported muscle soreness, as you might expect considering the level of muscle damage, was also increased in the 2nd group.

But, and here is what’s interesting, gains in muscle size and muscular strength were pretty much the same between the 2 sets of subjects.

Preceding research has shown that the source of muscle soreness after a training session is the connective tissue that helps to bind muscle fibers together, rather than the actual muscle fibers themselves.

Plus the feeling of muscle soreness appears to be due to alterations in the chemical environment surrounding muscle tissue as opposed to injury to the muscle cell itself.

In other words, the fact that you’re not sore is not going to mean that your muscles aren’t growing. Likewise, sore muscles don’t necessarily translate into more rapid growth.

Muscle soreness is just a sign that you altered something, did something that your body wasn’t used to, or performed a movement that just happens to cause more soreness than others.

Will stretching eliminate muscle soreness?

Stretching prior to or immediately after training is unable to reduce delayed-onset muscle soreness.

When a group of scientists examined a number of muscle soreness reports, they learned that stretching immediately after exercise led to an average lowering of post-exercise ache of only 2 percent – a consequence that’s very likely to be of no practical meaning for the majority.

DOMS has to do with minute damage to muscle fibers and the resulting recovery process. The moment those muscle fibers have been damaged, no amount of post-exercise stretching can then undamage them.