Understanding Muscle Soreness:

*Dennis Wolf

I think soreness is a good way to judge whether or not you
did enough in the gym. If you don’t feel any soreness at all,
it might mean you didn’t train hard enough that day. If you
are so sore that you can hardly move a muscle for a few
days, you did too much. I know my limits, and I don’t
always get sore. Does that mean you aren’t going to grow?
I’m not sure about that. My shoulders very rarely get sore,
and they are one of my best body parts. My legs always get
sore, and my chest and back do too. The only time
everything gets sore is when I take a few weeks off from
training and then get back in the gym, but that happens to
everybody. But like I said, soreness can be a way to rate if
what you did was enough or too much. I think if you train
legs and get so sore that you can hardly walk for three days,
that’s way too much.

*Branch Warren

To be honest, I don’t know. I’ve had awesome workouts
where I fully expected to be crazy sore the next day, and I
wasn’t. At other times, I’ve had workouts that I didn’t
consider to be anything special where I did get really sore.
Usually soreness comes from doing an exercise you’ve
never done before, or haven’t done in a long time.
Techniques like drop sets and forced reps can make you
sore too. Higher volume than normal will do it. I don’t really
put much stock in DOMS [delayed onset muscle soreness]
being a marker of a productive workout. I prefer to go by
the pump. That’s something you know right then and there
whether you’ve achieved it or not, and I think pumping the
muscle as much as possible is going to lead to growth, as
long as you’re not using very light weights. My legs, chest
and back always get sore. My arms probably get sore once
or twice a year. I can’t even remember the last time my
calves got sore. Shoulders, occasionally.

*Victor Martinez 

Soreness is a tricky thing. For the longest time, I would wait
until the day after my workout to judge how good it had
been, based on how sore I felt in that body part. If I wasn’t
sore, I figured I had failed even though I thought I had
worked really hard. I think that’s natural for all
bodybuilders. You seek out soreness to validate that you’re
training as hard as you should be. You pat yourself on the
back a little when you get really sore, and you kick yourself
a little if you’re not. But after a while, I started to notice that
I would have workouts where I got great contractions and
had a perfect connection with the body part, I was using
very decent weights and I would get crazy pumped— but
there was no soreness the next day. I knew in my heart that
workout was awesome, so after a while I stopped
associating soreness with the workout being more or less
productive.
Recovery has a lot to do with soreness. I find that when I
am getting plenty of rest, eating very well and
supplementing properly, I hardly ever get sore. The one
thing that does seem to do it for me is whenever I do a lot
more volume than usual for a body part in a given workout.
If you maintain a pump and all that lactic acid is building up
for something like two hours, you’re going to get sore for
sure. And I welcome it!