Can You Build Muscle Without Feeling Sore?

Can you build muscle without feeling sore? Soreness doesn't necessarily correlate with muscle growth. Let's talk about why that's the case.

Build Muscle Without Soreness

Soreness doesn't necessarily correlate with having a good workout or building muscle in general. You don't want to be necessarily chasing the soreness or feel like you need to be sore after every single workout. Because that's not the case.

You should have some soreness, but you shouldn't feel dead on the floor after your workout. Soreness is typically a result of your muscles breaking down as you're working them.

And you absolutely don't want to feel like you're sore and can't recover from that session, because that's going to impair your muscle growth over the long term. Make sure that you are coming into each session recovered. Having a little bit of soreness there is good—it gives you kind of that sign that you worked your muscles hard. However, being sore all the time is never a good time.

Fatigue Ratio

There's something known as the stimulus to fatigue ratio. And all that means is that when you're working out or you're lifting weights, you're creating a stimulus to your muscles. And that stimulus needs to be recovered from in order for you to build new tissue.

There needs to be a period of time that goes by that when you create that stimulus— when you're breaking down your muscle fibers—they need to recover and come back to baseline before you can actually build new muscle tissue.

If you're not allowing yourself to recover, you're actually going to be doing a lot of work and not reaping the rewards because your muscles are not going to be able to just recover in general. Make sure that you're recovering properly—you want to make sure that you're taking care of what we call fatigue management.

If you're not paying attention to that, you're going to be doing a lot of work in the gym and it's not going to be paying off. That's a big mistake that I made myself for a long time and I see a lot of my clients making it—doing too much and not letting yourself recover.

You don't need to be dead on the floor after every workout or in a pool of sweat. That's not the case. You just need to make sure that you're doing enough, but you're also recovering enough so that you can actually get the muscle growth that you're looking for.

Don't chase soreness. Don't chase the sweat. Focus on being intentional about what you're doing—work hard and recover properly.

Start building muscle without all the non-stop soreness. We'll show you how. Check out the other exercise and nutrition content here on the blog and on the podcast—it'll give you the guidance you need to workout properly.