Reduce Muscle Soreness? Here's What Actually Works

First, what soreness actually is

Delayed onset muscle soreness — DOMS, if you want the acronym — is the stiffness and tenderness that turns up 12 to 24 hours after training, usually peaks around 24 to 72 hours, and then quietly disappears.

It shows up most after two things: exercise you aren’t used to, and exercise with a lot of lowering in it. Running downhill, the slow descent of a squat, lowering a heavy dumbbell under control. Those lengthening contractions are the ones that leave you sore.

That repair response is the point. It’s not damage in the sense of injury. It’s the process that makes the muscle more resilient next time.

The things that don't work as well as you've been told

This is the part where I have to correct my younger self.

Stretching

The Cochrane review looked at exactly this question — does stretching before or after exercise reduce muscle soreness — and pooled the trials that tested it. The conclusion was that stretching produces little or no reduction in post-exercise soreness (Herbert, de Noronha & Kamper, 2011).

Not a small benefit worth chasing. Essentially nothing.

Stretching is still worth doing if you want more range of motion, or because it feels good. Just not for this.

The cool-down

Same story. A review in Sports Medicine went through what an active cool-down actually achieves and found that it doesn’t meaningfully reduce delayed onset soreness, and doesn’t reduce injury risk either (Van Hooren & Peake, 2018).

Walking for five minutes at the end of a session is pleasant. It is not a soreness intervention.

Warming up

The warm-up survives, but not for the reason I originally gave. Warming up improves performance in the session you’re about to do (Fradkin et al., 2010) — you’ll move better, and you’ll be readier for hard efforts.

It just isn’t the thing standing between you and sore legs on Wednesday.

What actually reduces soreness

Now the useful part.

Having done it before

This is the big one, and it’s not close. Your muscles adapt remarkably quickly to a specific pattern of loading — after a single bout of unfamiliar exercise, the same session done again weeks later produces dramatically less soreness and damage. Researchers call it the repeated bout effect (Hyldahl, Chen & Nosaka, 2017).

Which gives you the single most practical piece of advice in this whole article: the soreness problem is mostly a progression problem.

If you come back after six weeks off and do the session you were doing before the break, you will be wrecked. If you come back and do half of it, you’ll be mildly stiff — and the week after that you can do more, because your body has already banked the protection.

Keeping moving

Gentle activity — a walk, an easy ride, moving the sore limbs through their range — tends to make you feel better while you’re doing it. It won’t shorten how long the soreness lasts, but “feels better now” has real value when you’re stiff.

The instinct to lie completely still is the wrong one.

Massage

Of all the recovery methods that have been formally compared, massage comes out best for soreness. A meta-analysis of recovery techniques found massage the most effective of the options tested (Dupuy et al., 2018), and a separate review focused specifically on DOMS reached the same conclusion (Guo et al., 2017).

Effects are modest, and it’s not free. But if you’re going to spend money on one recovery thing, it’s the one with the evidence behind it.

Sleep and food

Neither is glamorous and neither has a clever mechanism to explain here. You’re asking your body to repair tissue. It does that better when it’s rested and when there’s enough protein and enough total food coming in.

Time

Sorry. It goes away on its own in a few days, and nothing you buy will change that by much.

Should you train when you're sore?

Usually, yes — with some judgement.

Mild to moderate soreness isn’t a reason to skip a session. You can often train the same muscles again at a reduced load, or train something else entirely and let the sore bits recover on their own schedule.

What I’d avoid is testing your maximum while you’re properly sore. Soreness reduces your force output and changes how you move, so a heavy day on legs that are still complaining is a bad combination — you’ll perform worse and compensate in ways you wouldn’t normally.

The simple rule: if it loosens up once you’ve warmed up, train. If it gets worse as you go, stop.

When soreness isn't just soreness

Ordinary DOMS is achy, symmetrical, worst on day two, and steadily improving after that.

That is a rare situation, and it is not what is happening to most people who are stiff after leg day. But it’s worth knowing the difference.

So what should you actually do?

Warm up, because it makes the session better. Stretch if you enjoy it or want the range of motion. Cool down if you like walking.

But if the goal is genuinely to be less sore, the answer is much less exciting than a stretching routine: build up gradually, so that nothing you do is a total shock to your body. Then sleep, eat properly, keep moving on the sore days, and let the days pass.

The soreness fades either way. What you’re really deciding is whether you built up to it sensibly.