The Truth: Should you train if your muscles are sore with DOMS?

This is a question which really divides experts and beginners alike. Science and logic tells us that when your muscles are still sore, they have not fully recovered from the previous session, therefore it is futile to train them again as you will just be over-training.

The idea is that you should rest your muscles, eat, sleep and let them recover for between 5-7 days before you train them again. This way they are fully ready and charged to push you past your personal best and grow. Of course you are free to train other muscle groups in this down time.

When you train “sore” muscles, they are not at their best or fully recovered and thus they don’t give you all they have got. You end up with a bad workout and even more pain and soreness over the following days.

Take all the above on board and now consider the sworn view of many, which is that you must stick to a heavy and intense regime where you train no matter what. To them, soreness and pain is a natural part of training. To these hardcore believers, you must train whether sore or not and go way past the pain.

What is the real answer? Let’s find a middle ground. If you want to train when you are sore and you truly believe that you can still achieve personal bests, then go for it - but never train when you have pain. i.e pain that says there is something wrong. Training with an injury can seriously harm you and set you back months (sometimes years).

Another way of achieving your goals and getting that dream body faster is to try and eliminate the soreness rapidly by using supplements. Certain supplements can act as buffers and catalysts when you have post-training muscle soreness or more routinely called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS).

Creatine is a very good supplement for almost immediate recovery from muscle soreness after your workouts. A supplement like Nuclear Creatine taken immediately after your workout can help you have little or no muscle soreness - as good as if you had rested for 2-3 days!

Protein is another great supplement for accelerating muscle recovery and ensuring that you keep muscle soreness to a minimum and therefore enabling you to increase training frequency and training intensity. As with anything else, the higher the quality of the protein, the quicker the results. Take a supplement like LA Whey Gold and you will seriously reduce muscle soreness to almost zero. Take it regularly and you will have no muscle soreness and be able to train much more often for much longer.

Final recap, if you have pain and it is uncomfortable to train or you feel you are weak and may damage something, get out of the gym and make sure you rest your muscles until all is well again. Take Creatine and Whey Protein to speed up healing.