Is It Okay to Exercise with Sore Muscles?
A tough workout can have lasting effects. The next morning, even simple actions like turning over or standing up can make your muscles ache. You might have planned to exercise again, but now you’re wondering: Can I still work out if my muscles are sore?
The answer is, it depends.
“Muscle soreness isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” says exercise physiologist Alyssa Olenick. Some level of soreness is normal after a challenging workout or when you try new exercises. This is called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), where discomfort typically peaks 48 hours after exercise and usually disappears within 72 hours. This happens because pushing our muscles beyond their usual limits can cause tissue breakdown, triggering an inflammatory response. (Don’t worry—the breakdown isn’t harmful; the repair process that follows actually makes our muscles stronger.)
“Your body essentially sends a lot of immune cells to that muscle tissue, because it needs to clean up the muscle breakdown,” Olenick explains. “The soreness you feel is actually the swelling and all those cells coming in to clean up the breakdown, putting pressure on the nerves in your muscles.”
The main thing to consider is how sore you feel. If the pain is around a “three” on a scale of one to 10, it’s perfectly fine to exercise, according to Rick Richey, faculty instructor for the National Academy of Sports Medicine. You might just need to adjust your workout based on your soreness level, Olenick adds, lifting lighter weights or taking it easier during runs, for example.
However, if your soreness is more than a mild ache, take it as a sign to back off. “Your body is smart: It’s telling you that you’re sore so you don’t do it again,” Richey says.
In this case, it’s best to give your body time to recover—even if your fitness tracker suggests pushing harder. Some trackers use your heart rate variability to calculate a “recovery” or “readiness” score, which reflects overall stress levels in your body. (A decreased variation between heartbeats indicates that your nervous system is in a more fight-or-flight state.) “Your heart rate response doesn’t necessarily know that your muscles hurt,” Olenick says.
Trying to push through extreme soreness can disrupt the recovery process, undermining your efforts. “The recovery from the workout is [when] the protein synthesis actually takes place and you start to build muscle and build strength,” Richey adds. “If you cut the recovery too short, then you’re not going to get the benefits you want.”
Furthermore, working out with extremely sore muscles isn’t very beneficial. “If you’re very sore, that impacts the strength of your muscles,” says Carol Ewing Garber, professor of movement science and education at Columbia University Teachers College. Sore muscles can’t produce as much force and will typically fatigue faster. So even if you wanted to do 20 push-ups, you might not be able to complete them all or go as deep as usual. Richey adds that intense soreness can affect your form, so you might not get the intended benefit from the exercises you’re doing—and could even end up injuring yourself.
There’s also a rare but serious condition called rhabdomyolysis—often shortened to “rhabdo”—that can occur. “It happens when somebody really overdoes it and causes very significant damage to the muscle,” Garber says. Rapid muscle breakdown can lead to kidney damage that, in extreme cases, can be life-threatening.
So what should you do when you’re so sore you can hardly move? Listen to what your body is telling you, and take a rest day. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be completely still, though. It can actually be helpful to do some light movement like walking, low-intensity cycling, or a gentle . Although it might hurt initially to get up off the sofa and start, you’ll likely feel a little better by the time you sit back down. “Getting blood flow to those tissues can help the body do that cellular cleanup it’s trying to do,” Olenick says. might also be useful for the same reason, Garber adds.
If you’re really eager for another tough workout, you can focus on muscles that don’t hurt—for instance, do a leg day if your arms are aching. “If you’re sore in one muscle, it’s localized,” Richey says. “You’ve got a whole different portion of your body that you can start looking at exercising.”
Even if you’re following a dedicated workout program or training for a big event like a triathlon, taking a day or two off won’t undo all your hard work. Remember, recovery is where the real progress happens. “Some muscle soreness is a good thing in the long-term because then as the muscle repairs, it becomes stronger and becomes more resistant to soreness occurring in the future,” Garber says. So give your body the time it needs to heal. “It’s good to be a little patient.”