For many bodybuilders, competitive athletes, and men who just like to work out, sore muscles are the marker of a “good” workout. If your muscles aren’t sore the next day or the day after, then you probably didn’t work out enough; anyway, that’s what many of us have been taught to believe. But is that really true? Do we need to train hard enough that every time we train our muscles are sore? Let’s find out.

For years, fitness experts and doctors thought sore muscles were the result of lactic acid buildup after intense training sessions. Lactic acid is produced when you exercise or lift weights very hard, when your muscles cry out for more oxygen than your blood can currently provide. Because the body can’t supply the oxygen the muscles need, it compensates by starting another process, one that works in the absence of oxygen. Lactic acid is a byproduct of this process. And since it is an acid, it makes us “feel the burn”.

So while on the surface it makes sense that lactic acid might be the culprit in causing muscle soreness after an intense training session, it just isn’t. Actually, lactic acid is removed from the muscles quite quickly, it doesn’t stay for hours or days. But, the muscle soreness that we are talking about here does not appear from 8 to 36 hours after training. So if it can’t be lactic acid causing the pain, what is?

Modern science points to micro-traumas…

..as the real perpetrators that cause post-workout muscle soreness. Microtraumas are exactly what they sound like: small abrasions, tears, or localized damage to muscle fibers, specifically, the membranes and contractile elements. The researchers took biopsies from muscles suffering from training-induced microtrauma and found that the z-bands were bleeding, leading to disruption of their function.

Z bands are filaments that hold muscle fibers together as they glide over each other as they contract. When damaged and bleeding, even microscopically, muscle fibers swell up and, of course, hurt.

They have even found a way to assess how badly muscles have been damaged by measuring the level of creatine phosphokinase (CPK) in the bloodstream. CPK is normally found within muscle fibers, but when the fibers are damaged, CPK is released into the bloodstream. The higher the level of CPK in the bloodstream, the greater the damage to the muscles, which means more pain.

Some people say that stretching after a workout can ease the severity of delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), as it’s called these days. However, knowing what we now know about the causes of pain, we realize that this is simply not true. While stretching before and after a workout is always a good idea, it won’t do much to reduce or eliminate sore muscles the next day because microtrauma is the real source of pain, not lactic acid.

So is muscle pain necessary? The answer is that to some extent yes, it is necessary. It is the stress or trauma that comes from lifting heavy and heavy objects that causes our muscles to grow and become stronger. If you never train to the point where your muscles ache the next day, the truth is that you’re not training hard enough and you’re not seeing the results you’d probably like to see. On the other hand, ignoring the pain and blindly continuing to train “through the pain” is also not the answer. If you don’t pay attention to what your body is saying, you will pay the price sooner or later and end up hurting yourself, possibly very seriously.

The secret to managing pain is twofold:

1) Increase your workload gradually. Don’t try to show off by taking big leaps in the amount of weight you’re lifting, give your muscles time to adjust.

2) Allow your body plenty of time to rest and recover between training sessions. Remember, the rest and recovery part of bodybuilding is just as important as the weight lifting part. It is during this process that your muscles are actually growing, not when you are exercising.

So while your goal shouldn’t be to completely eliminate training-induced muscle soreness, it’s important to know that you can manage it and minimize its impact on your body and training routine.