Does SORENESS = MUSCLE GROWTH? (ft. Dr. Mike Israetel)

welcome back to strawber science Dr mil wolf with you today with an expert Dr Mike isto talking about perception of soreness in training as a means to guide whatever you're doing in the gym like adding sets removing sets doing different exercises essentially how would you use soreness would you use it with regards to your lifting practice that's a great question I assume it's in the context of hypertrophy correct cool so I've explained this a few times sometimes at length and a lot of times when I explain it folks will understand what I'm getting at and

sometimes I think something's kind of Lost in Translation because I kind of have like a it's kind of a two it's a little bit more complicated than just soreness means this soreness doesn't mean that and so I'll try to explain it in such a way that it's because about as simple as I can explain it but that still conveys roughly what I'm trying to get at so fundamentally what really matters is are you getting stronger for reps over time and if that's occurring the sess is going to be always and everywhere very much secondary to

that so if you're getting stronger over time I'm not going to like kick dicks out of your mouth and tell you like you're doing soreness wrong or some [ __ ] like that soreness becomes much more of a thing when it it has two cases one is if you're not getting sore at all and and other indicators in your program seem to suggest underdosing uh or you just have like the easiest recovery in the world and you're not progressing either at all or at a pace you have come to expect or for some good reason

expect to progress at so if you're not getting sore ever let's say a quick example you're training your triceps and they're not big and they are not growing your rep strength over time is a increasing and you have trouble with uh kind of generating a mind muscle connection I think there's triceps back there I'm not so sure and you're also not getting sore I would say that whatever amount of tricep training you're doing and by amount I mean total stimulus which could be proximity to failure the degree of um effectiveness of your Technique how good

your Technique is exercise selection and the biggest one is training volume something there is probably under stimulating and if you also don't get sore I can tell you yeah it's probably a decent idea to try to crank up the stimulus that brings in the secondary discussion of soreness if let's say you train 2 days a week also triceps Monday Thursday just to keep the [ __ ] real simple and you have delayed onset soret that lasts from Monday until Wednesday evening or even Thursday morning and then you have a delay onset sorus that lasts from

from Friday morning after the Thursday session all the way to Sunday evening consistently whatever problems you have with your Gams I would proposition that an underdosing of stimulus is highly unlikely to be one of them because if you cranked up the stimulus you would start to get overlapping soreness and we know that at least in some methods of analysis consistent overlapping soreness means you're probably under recovering and it means that you're not your strong longest at the time of lifting and yes some studies on very beginner people with a neurological adaptations on Pace everything show

that even if you're sore you can still make strength gains but I'll tell you this if you have to do your best in the gym for any one session do you want to be sore coming into that session or not sore I surmise that the answer is not sore and so if someone says look man my triceps aren't growing I go do you get sore and they go dude I've never been sore I'm like oo outside of the other methods of analysis I would say it's incrementally beneficial for you to consider that you're underdosing somehow

and doing more may be part of the answer on the other hand if you tell me like dude my triceps aren't growing and do you get sore like unsore all the [ __ ] time my next guess is probably doing less might be better than doing more in that context especially if it's regular not just like your first week or something like that so that's kind of high approached soreness but it can be instructive at its extremes especially to put it another way really quick really simple if you're struggling to grow something and you just

never have felt Doms in it you might want to experiment with some intensification for example length and partials consistently make almost everyone that tries them more sore than usual not just from novelty regularly for weeks and end and they seem to kind of [ __ ] work cranking up volume will make you more sore and so on and so on on the other hand if you're just getting sore like [ __ ] crazy you're probably more limited by recovery and training harder is highly unlikely to be a part of the answer one final question on

sorus before I give my sort of response to that one thing I think we need to clarify is what does sorus actually mean to you I can answer this in a couple of ways one is there is a high degree of uncertainty about what the physiological mechanisms of sorus are and we've known that for a long time I know of at least one old ultr structural tissue analysis paper that showed with analysis of things like zline streaming and things that sonus was much more aligned with a a very robust hypertrophic response than it was with

a response of pure muscle damage we also know that SOS arisis is a secondary feature not a primary feature of stimulus we know it probably has something to do with immune infiltration also and I'm very confident about this when you take more drugs you get more sleep and you eat more food you get more sore not less and if it was just linear damage you would be like but all these things help the damage how the hell is sorus thing now so to me what sorus actually is at a deep analytical level is unclear but

I do know that sorus also correlates with the following things the introduction of a new exercise or new rep range and we we know that novelty is highly correlated to gains because that's how newb gains work if newb gains aren't magic God doesn't know what time it is in your life for training the novelty effect is the newb gains effect and is profoundly helpful for hypertrophy we know that you get more sore if you uh get closer to failure we also know that causes hypertrophy we know that you get more sore if you do more

volume that cause hypertrophy we know if you do uh more Ecentric control at long muscle lengths that causes more s we also know robustly that causes more hypertrophy you start to line up all the variables here's another thing in my coaching of very many athletes especially uh athlete athletes volleyball players soccer players the people that grow muscle the fastest visually they get the strongest that are the more fast fiber oriented they get robustly more sore than everyone else endurance athletes [ __ ] 10 sets of everything they just don't get sore and you're like all

right well soreness has nothing to do with growth no worries and then they don't [ __ ] grow too many correlations for me to just be like this has nothing to do with anything so I suspect that us is a proxy not the proxy and there are other things going on that can even conflate these variables a proxy for the degree of stimulus introduced does that mean stimulus equals growth no but stimulus may cause growth I think it makes a lot of sense and by in large I agree that soreness is typically correlated to some

degree with stimulus for hypertrophy I guess the one thing that strikes me in all this like we agree on most things when it comes to stimulus when it comes to underdosing training volume or intensity or what have you for I purch y the one thing I struggle with from the research side of things is using soreness potentially as aox fatigue the reason for that is as you mentioned soreness is not a super well understood topic soreness is kind of it could be caused by a variety of factors and a recent review paper I think identified

about eight factors eight separate factors that could be responsible for the soreness perception another way of saying we just don't know exactly like there's just a lot of uncertainty there right and that was 3 years ago line up of eight people to do a crime and you're like it could be all eight like wow excellent see later ited them and you're like all right could be that gu could be that gu yeah um so we really don't understand soreness and how it relates even to muscle damage sure and in fact there's a study by msaka

and colleagues from 2005 I believe where they essentially had participants performing very damaging protocol in the biceps with eent contractions essentially creating a bunch of muscle damage and then measuring markers of muscle damage like creating chies like recovery of performance recover performance from before the damaging bout to after the damaging bout say 2 hours later 24 hours later Etc that is probably one of if not the best moru of recovery right essentially the degree of muscle damage induced didn't really correlate very well with how people perceive their soreness did it correlate somewhat with it was

it depended on position so essentially soreness was assessed in three different positions like with your arm extended flexed and palpated and there was a few things one no matter the position the correlation between perceived soreness and any marker of muscle damage whether it was creating chinise recovery of performance in a very unskilled test AK isometric test the correlation was always about 0.3 or less so quite a weak correlation if there was one and more importantly the correlation of soreness in different positions was also quite low between about 0.3 and 0.6 mhm so how you assess

soreness can also heavily impact how sore you feel and so if all you're going by in the gym is like ah feeling pretty sore but then some days you're you're feeling it while you're stretching some days you're feeling it while you're moving up some days you're feeling it while you're actually do movement all of those are different assessments of soreness and they may not correlate successfully for sure I I'm uninterested in what beginners think about how sore they are they just aren't interested in any perceptual factors beginners half short of like I think something broke

do you think ability to perceive soreness is something that advanc people get better at like substantially better yeah absolutely because I a lot of beginners can't even differentiate joint soreness and muscle belly soreness sure uh and so you really don't know what the [ __ ] you're at we don't know anything about this from research side could be true could be not true it's true yeah I I'm open to that possibility um but I just think specifically as far as using it as a metric of recovery I think performance in the gym should be by

far the primary one and at this stage I don't think we have anecdotally we may have some evidence like hey when I feel sared sometimes I don't perform well what have you but from that study specifically there was actually a positive correlation between sorness and performance so people were a bit more sore if anything perform a little bit better and that's in line with some research suggesting that soreness is more indicative of the remodeling process than it is of damage so damage occurs instantly when you exercise mhm soreness seems to be more so delayed indicative

or indicating that it is more more in alignment with the remodeling process from damage than it is actual muscle damage and disruption disruption to the muscle I've been saying that for about 20 years uh yay I got something right but doesn't that also highly implicate soreness and a probability of being associated with growth isn't sorus like you're still growing and recovering and remodeling if sorus is implicated as a symptom of remodeling why are you in the gym training if you're still remodeling is an interesting question to ask now there could be like well look like

overlapping remodeling curves are totally fine I'm open to that idea but uh maybe if you waited a little bit and then hit it again when you were healed maybe it would be all good to go I'm not sure about that but I think especially the extremes it starts to make sense if you're so sore that you're clearly not going to lift as much as usual maybe it's time to back the [ __ ] up a little bit and wait a little bit if you're a little bit sore I just don't think it's a big deal

either way yeah I I see that the one thing I'll come back to and now we talk about the research a little bit is exponentially when I am sore that doesn't consistently predict High perform if I'm cripplingly sore like for example I once did the uh a session from the NF study the 26 set session where they were doing 52 sets of quads a week I did that essentially unprepared and my God I hit uh un five mobile levels of soreness you peak in soreness so 3 Days Later instantly oh you got it felt like

it was instant like it was like I was sore for 6 seven days maybe six seven days when was the worst soreness what day honestly it was it was if I had to rate it and that's the issue with rating obviously may not be consistent or reliable happy but if I had to rate it for the th like 3 days it was 10 out 10 yeah amazing from like two hours maybe an hour even onwards I remember not really being able to walk properly for a few hours yeah it was it was incredible but anyways

outside of extreme circumstances I haven't found that a perception of soreness is really indicative of how performing gy and to me because Rec well because performance in the gym is the best proxy for Recovery because it essentially incorporates a lot of stuff right like it incorporates already psychologically ready how damage your muscles potentially all of that stuff like more Central factors and more per factors if sess doesn't performance I'm inclined to go consistently in sort of day-to-day normal contexts I'm inclined to say it may not be the best predictor of should I be training how

much oh is definitely not the best predictor of that but I would also say that if sess seems to be more and more linked in literature as part of the remodeling process for sport athletes like if you're sore shut up go on the soccer field nobody gives a [ __ ] you're not going to break into pieces you'll perform just fine unless you're crippled but if your goal is hypertrophy and remodeling is clearly still robustly occurring as evidenced by sorus why not just take more time off and or next week when when you do the

session again do four sets instead of six sure so that you can have an area under the curve of remodeling that ends relatively close to your next session the issue I take with using soreness essentially as a means to individualize training is that we don't know a ton about sorness and we don't even have super clear evidence on exactly whether or not remodeling is the growth of SP like there's there's going to be differences right so there's a recovery model and response and a tissue aggregation exactly like sh studies right they could be very linked

Asama study suggest or they could be pretty different in some context or they could Ur over different timelines variet things it's really not a well understood area of resour yeah and so my contention or my issue with this stuff is are we using soreness and pump and other experiential variables as a means to Auto regulate or individualize training but potentially moving things in a Direction that isn't optimal right cuz if we have now I think what 20 studies on volume we're close to it and sure they work in averages right so they can only really

inform us well about our starting place but still because they work in averages the average responder in the study will be somewhat similar to the average responder in the real world but so if we're using these variables to say all right let's move your volume for chest from what we think is going to be quite effective based on literature say 15 to 25 sets a week for your chest and you're getting sore and we use soreness as like a very strong pred predictive factor of stimulus or recovery and we're like look you're still sore 3

days later we need to reduce volume or if it's overlapping soreness if that t takes us from 15 to 25 sets which is what we've empirically derived to be a solid place for most people and we take that down to say eight sets from empirical versus rational perspective I tend to identify more with the empirical side of things because in these studies we actually measuring growth from manipulating the variable of interest M so it's the most direct research there is so if you're using an area of research or a variable that we don't understand fully

yet and we're doing at the expense of this variable we've tested empirically quite a few times I fear we might be actually reducing muscle growth MH and that's where the real risk of using soreness or the pump or these variables that aren't fully understood yet really arises to me yeah does that make sense tot what's your General fallowing on my general thought is you could have a situation which the averages make sense but uh in the averages could be optimized even more if you let individuals guide themselves through soreness which we don't have any data

to prove against so the average growth can be good even when some people get overlapping soreness but if you designed a study which you Auto regulated via soreness responses we could find out later that they every everyone gets better growth the people that can recover faster get more volume we already know people who are recovering more easily to increase their volume they do better it's if people have trouble recovering and you know the soreness versus recovery thing is a bit tentative then maybe they can do less and benefit we already know that the standard deviation

of optimal volume within any given study is quite large it's not like everyone is somewhere between 17 and 14 sets do very very large Deltas on that so maybe soreness can help guide us another thing is at the beginning of a program this compelling reasoning that you just gave as you work through a program you're uh you just don't get soore nearly as easily and then your ability to float into the muscle uh hypertrophy ranges that are really really uh overall quite optimal is is pretty much unabated I mean you could just keep adding sets

for a while and everything's all good so I use sorus in two ways I use it at the extremes and I use it as one of the decisional variables on top of all of the others so like with the RP hypertophy app for example if you tell it you have psychotic go go right now right now I need money I don't see money um if it uh if you tell it like I'm get super [ __ ] sore still from last week it'll reduce your volume and the next time that you go around but you

can always just hit the plus sign at add a set we never disable that function at the end of the day if you're like [ __ ] it I'm sore but whatever I don't give a [ __ ] we're like hey maybe maybe that works so uh really it's just a matter of uh after the first few days or weeks of a program you you may be the amount of volume it may take to get you really sore probably starts to line up with the volume recommendations that we see generally in the literature now at

first in week one Soros comes really easily but I would also contend based on an interview I did a little while ago with pack that easing into a program so that you never get the psychotic sorus also has its advantages as well so that's kind of how I see it cool I think we agree uh by and large I think what It ultimately comes down to is one maybe differences in minimizing type one error rate versus getting that potential benefit which as a coach it makes sense right even if something doesn't have all of the

evidence behind it yet but there's a potential benefit like LinkedIn partials for example I tend to think it may be what incorporating right totally as a practitioner for sure but from an evidence-based perspective it may be a little bit different totally and it's totally valid as a way to operate within the j% what I like to do is I like to take the empirical evidence as the foundation for things that are very likely correct and very likely Incorrect and then I take more heris variables like sonus and pump on a layer them on top of

that and if they can give me incremental hypothetical margin of more intelligent decision- making I'll use them but I won't use them if they violate the underpinning variables uh so but most times that doesn't happen with people sometimes it does and then and then a lot of times you have to seek a little further clarification like tell you this like uh I I'm familiar with one gentleman I consulted with recently who has been getting sore from one or two sets for like four or 5 days at a time and it's been getting more intense even

though he's been training for months and months I legitimately told him to go see a doctor because like that is a very unusual have you ever seen that in practice like you train up and then you're getting more sore yeah and and the volume it takes to get you sore is is I've never seen that mind turn exact that's the thing right like we don't fully understand what factors contribute to differences in how people perceive soreness for sure it's a perception of soreness versus actual muscle damage and the uh the jump from one to the

other can be totally totally and and and uh I will say this I I have never tied my card to the horse that says soreness equals muscle damage I always thought that sorus was more indicative of secondary immune infiltration caused muscle damage but that's the same kind of muscle damage as primary muscle damage and it's less muscle damage but more like the immune system cells actually unzipping the various parts of the muscle cell and starting to fix the [ __ ] that's what it seems like is occurring here's another piece of compelling um secondary tier

evidence anti-inflammatory drugs cannot possibly interfere with with muscle damage the [ __ ] Superman drug you can't break your muscles they don't do that but if you take high doses of n ineds pre during and post you get a huge decline in delay on set muscle soreness and also a decline in hyper same with cold water in it cold water you know down like blood flow and all totally you know but but once about eight out of 10 variables line up to soreness and growth point in the same general direction I got to think like

man to it's soreness but also muscle down damage so in this case nids literally reduce inflammation on the physiological level correct but they also happen to reduce soreness right yes I agree that that's some evidence in favor of the two going hand in hand but it's important to acknowledge whenever we discuss them obviously we're giving advice to people ultimately we have to be somewhat practical sure but I think just on a framework level we always have to be like okay let's uh this thing was should to a old these are all educated guesses and they're

all highly imperfect for sure yeah hey man it was beautiful I love it if you like the video like the video comment subscribe and stay tuned peace [Music]