Being Sore Doesn't Mean You're Growing

Opener

The first few weeks of a new program, or the first weeks back after time off, are when you feel the most beaten up. You're sore for days, your strength dips, and it feels like the training must be working. The research says that early phase is mostly repair. The muscle starts putting real effort into growth only once the damage settles down.

A 2015 review in Sports Medicine by Felipe Damas, Stuart Phillips, Felipe Cassaro Vechin and Carlos Ugrinowitsch, from the University of São Paulo and McMaster University, looked at how the muscle-building response to a workout changes as training goes on, and why the response in the first sessions does not predict how much muscle someone eventually gains. The same group then tested that idea directly in a 10-week training study published in The Journal of Physiology in 2016.

---

1. What this review is asking

Every hard session raises muscle protein synthesis, the process of building new muscle protein. Muscle grows when those rises add up over time. For years, researchers measured that rise in the hours after a single workout in untrained people and treated it as a stand-in for growth.