Yes, DOMS gets significantly better the more you work out. Your body has a built-in adaptation called the repeated bout effect: after you perform an exercise that makes you sore, doing that same exercise again produces noticeably less soreness, less strength loss, and less swelling. This protection kicks in surprisingly fast, often within days of your first session, and it’s one of the most consistent findings in exercise science.
How the Repeated Bout Effect Works
When you first challenge a muscle with an unfamiliar movement, the force creates small-scale damage to muscle fibers and the connective tissue surrounding them. That damage triggers the familiar soreness that peaks 24 to 72 hours later. But your body doesn’t just repair the damage. It rebuilds those structures stronger than before.
Several changes happen simultaneously. Your body produces more protective proteins (structural components that reinforce the muscle fiber itself) during the healing process. Collagen gets deposited around the muscle-tendon junctions and the connective tissue sheaths wrapping each fiber, making them more resistant to mechanical stress. The membranes inside muscle cells that regulate calcium also get repaired in ways that make them harder to disrupt next time. All of these adaptations combine so that the next time you do the same exercise, less damage occurs in the first place, which means less soreness follows.
How Quickly Soreness Decreases
The protection begins earlier than most people expect. Research in rats found the repeated bout effect appeared as early as 2 days after the initial damaging exercise and remained strong for at least 14 days. It started to diminish around 28 days and was largely gone by 42 days. The practical takeaway: if you’re training a movement at least once every two to three weeks, you maintain most of the protective effect.
For beginners, introducing eccentric exercises (the lowering phase of a lift, downhill running, or any movement where the muscle lengthens under load) progressively over one to two weeks is enough to substantially reduce the severity of soreness. Most people who stick with a consistent program notice that the intense, movement-limiting soreness of their first week fades quickly. You may still feel mild soreness after hard sessions for years, but the kind that makes it painful to sit down or walk stairs is largely a beginner phenomenon.
Why Eccentric Movements Cause the Worst Soreness
Not all exercises produce equal soreness. Eccentric contractions, where the muscle lengthens while producing force, cause considerably more microstructural damage than concentric contractions, where the muscle shortens. Running involves more eccentric loading on the quads (each time your foot strikes the ground) than cycling, which is mostly concentric. That’s why your first long run of the season leaves you far more sore than your first long bike ride.
The flip side is that eccentric movements also drive faster neuromuscular adaptations, greater increases in a key growth factor involved in muscle building, and more stimulation of satellite cells (the repair cells that fuse with muscle fibers to help them grow). So the exercises that make you most sore initially are also the ones your body adapts to most aggressively, and the ones where you’ll notice the biggest drop in soreness over subsequent sessions.
Less Soreness Doesn’t Mean Less Growth
A common worry is that once you stop getting sore, you’re no longer stimulating muscle growth. The research doesn’t support this. In one study comparing two groups performing resistance training, one group showed clear markers of muscle damage (creatine kinase levels more than five times higher, plus self-reported soreness), while the other group showed essentially no detectable damage. Despite this dramatic difference in soreness and damage markers, both groups gained the same amount of muscle size and the same percentage increase in strength (25% vs. 26%). Levels of a key growth-signaling molecule increased equally in both groups.
Muscle growth can be triggered without any noticeable damage to the muscle. Soreness is a side effect of unfamiliar stress, not a receipt for productive training. If your workouts are progressively challenging but you rarely feel sore, that’s a sign your body has adapted, not that your training has stopped working.
What Helps (and Doesn’t Help) Recovery
Light movement between sessions does make a measurable difference. Active recovery, like easy walking, light cycling, or gentle swimming, enhances blood flow enough to clear metabolic byproducts roughly 12% faster than complete rest and can improve overall recovery speed by about 10%. You don’t need anything intense; the goal is just to promote circulation.
Omega-3 fatty acid supplements have been studied extensively for DOMS. A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials did find a statistically significant reduction in soreness with omega-3 supplementation, but the actual effect size was smaller than what’s considered a clinically meaningful difference on a pain scale. In practical terms, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
Over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen are worth being cautious about. Occasional use doesn’t appear to impair muscle growth, but there’s evidence that the inflammatory process these drugs suppress is involved in the signaling that drives muscle repair and growth. Regular use may interfere with satellite cell activity, which is especially relevant for people newer to training who have the most growth potential. Using anti-inflammatories to push through soreness and train harder isn’t a great long-term strategy.
When Soreness Signals Something Serious
Normal DOMS peaks between one and three days after exercise and gradually fades. It feels like generalized muscle tenderness and stiffness, not sharp or localized pain. If your soreness is far more severe than you’d expect, you feel unusually weak or unable to complete tasks you could normally handle, or you notice dark tea- or cola-colored urine, those are warning signs of rhabdomyolysis, a condition where muscle breakdown products flood the bloodstream and can damage the kidneys. This is most common after extreme or unfamiliar exercise volume, particularly in hot conditions. A blood test measuring creatine kinase is the definitive way to diagnose it.
Putting It Into Practice
If you’re new to training or returning after a long break, the soreness from your first few sessions can feel discouraging. The most effective strategy is to start with lower volume and intensity than you think you need, then increase over one to two weeks. This lets the repeated bout effect build up without sidelining you for days between workouts.
Once you’ve been training consistently for a few weeks, you’ll find that the same exercises that once left you hobbling barely register as sore. You’ll still experience mild soreness when you introduce new movements, significantly increase weight, or change your rep ranges, but it will be less intense and shorter-lived each time. The protection from a single session lasts at least two weeks, so training each muscle group once or twice a week is enough to maintain the adaptation. If you take more than about six weeks completely off from a movement, expect some soreness when you return, but the second round of adaptation typically happens faster than the first.