Q: I find I’m never sore from my workouts any longer. Does this mean I’m not making progress??

Many people often use muscle soreness as an indication of whether they’re making progress with their workouts. They believe that if they wake up the next morning and aren’t sore, this means they must not have put in enough effort in the gym the day before.

This can be quite discouraging for some, and they’ll start to make it their mission to do whatever it takes to develop muscle soreness.

Muscle Soreness and Workouts

What you must remember with this question however is that muscle soreness doesn’t always mean you’ve put in a hard workout. Muscle soreness comes about most whenever the body is exposed to some type of brand new stress, where it’s learning a new movement pathway.

For instance, whenever you try a brand new exercise that you haven’t done before, you’re going to be much sorer in those muscles than in the muscles that were worked with an exercise you’ve been doing for years.

Likewise, if you take a full two weeks off your training and then just get back into it, your muscles are essentially ‘relearning’ the movement again, and thus you wake up the next morning hardly able to walk.

If you’re working out regularly though and are doing similar exercises in the gym that you always do – but just adding more weight or increasing the sets, it’s only normal and natural that you won’t be quite as sore.

Also keep in mind that your recovery techniques – stretching, nutrition, sleep, and overall rest will also influence soreness, so that could be playing a role as well.

So don’t let the fact that you aren’t sore make you think you didn’t have a good workout. You can have great workouts and not be sore in the least, but this doesn’t mean you aren’t making progress.

Instead, focus on intensity. When you’re working out at a very high intensity, that’s when you know you’re getting in a good workout.