Muscle soreness after exercise typically peaks 24 to 72 hours after your workout and resolves within about four days. The good news: you can shorten that window and reduce the intensity with a combination of movement, nutrition, sleep, and a few simple recovery tools. Here’s what actually works.
Why You Get Sore in the First Place
The soreness you feel a day or two after a tough workout is called delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS. It’s not caused by lactic acid buildup, despite what you may have heard. Lactic acid clears from your muscles almost immediately after you stop exercising. Your liver and kidneys start breaking it down right away.
What actually causes DOMS is inflammation in the connective tissue surrounding your muscle fibers. When you push your muscles harder than they’re used to, especially with movements that lengthen the muscle under load (think: the lowering phase of a squat or running downhill), you create microscopic disruption in that connective tissue. Your body’s inflammatory response kicks in, releasing chemical signals that stimulate pain receptors. This is a normal part of how muscles adapt and get stronger, but it doesn’t have to sideline you for days.
Keep Moving at Low Intensity
One of the most effective things you can do when you’re sore is move. Active recovery, meaning light exercise at 30% to 60% of your maximum heart rate, increases blood flow to damaged tissues without adding further stress. For most people, that’s a walk, an easy bike ride, a light swim, or gentle yoga. You should be able to hold a full conversation the entire time.
Active recovery works because increased circulation delivers oxygen and nutrients to the inflamed tissue while helping clear metabolic waste. You don’t need a long session. Even 15 to 20 minutes can make a noticeable difference in how stiff and sore you feel the rest of the day.
Foam Roll, but Don’t Overdo It
Foam rolling can help loosen tight, sore muscles by applying pressure to areas of tension. The key is keeping it brief. Spend about one minute per muscle group, and don’t exceed two minutes on any single area. If you find a particularly tight knot, hold pressure on it for up to 30 seconds, then move on.
Rolling too aggressively or for too long on already-inflamed tissue can make soreness worse. Use moderate pressure: uncomfortable but not painful. Think of it as a way to gently encourage blood flow and reduce stiffness, not as a deep-tissue massage replacement. Setting a timer helps keep you from grinding away at the same spot.
Use Temperature to Your Advantage
Alternating between cold and warm water, sometimes called contrast therapy, can reduce soreness by repeatedly constricting and dilating blood vessels, which acts like a pump for inflammation. A protocol used by collegiate and professional athletes involves alternating one minute of cold water with one to two minutes of warm water, repeated for a total of 6 to 15 minutes. You can do this in the shower by switching between the coldest and warmest settings you can tolerate.
If contrast therapy feels like too much, a simple cold shower or ice bath after an intense workout can help blunt the initial inflammatory response. Warm baths on rest days, on the other hand, can relax tight muscles and ease stiffness.
Eat to Speed Recovery
What you eat after a workout directly affects how quickly your muscles repair. Protein provides the building blocks for tissue repair, so getting 20 to 40 grams within a couple hours of exercise gives your body what it needs to start rebuilding. Beyond protein, certain foods contain natural compounds that help manage inflammation.
Tart cherry juice is one of the most studied options. The common protocol across multiple studies is the equivalent of about 50 to 60 tart cherries per serving, taken twice a day (morning and evening). In practical terms, that’s about 8 to 12 ounces of tart cherry juice blend twice daily. Participants in studies who drank tart cherry juice for several days before and after intense exercise reported less soreness and faster strength recovery. Starting a few days before a particularly hard workout or event seems to offer the most benefit.
Other foods with natural anti-inflammatory properties include berries, fatty fish, ginger, and turmeric. These won’t eliminate soreness overnight, but consistently including them in your diet supports the recovery process over time.
Prioritize Sleep
Sleep is when your body does the heaviest lifting on repair. During deep sleep, your body releases growth hormone and shifts into an anabolic state that favors tissue rebuilding. Sleep deprivation appears to weaken muscle recovery by increasing protein breakdown and disrupting the hormonal environment muscles need to repair. While the exact relationship between sleep and muscle protein synthesis is still being studied, the hormonal shifts that happen during poor sleep clearly work against you.
If you’re training hard, aim for seven to nine hours. Consistency matters more than perfection. Going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time helps your body optimize the deep sleep phases where the most recovery happens.
Warm Up Smarter
How you prepare for exercise affects how sore you’ll be afterward. Dynamic stretching before a workout, meaning movement-based stretches like leg swings, walking lunges, and arm circles, prepares your muscles for the work ahead and is the preferred warm-up approach. Static stretching before exercise (holding a stretch for 30 or more seconds) has actually been shown to reduce maximal strength and power, so save it for afterward.
Static stretching after your workout, however, can help return muscles to their pre-exercise length and reduce post-workout stiffness. A simple post-workout routine of 5 to 10 minutes of static holds for the muscles you trained can make the next day noticeably more comfortable.
Consider Magnesium
Magnesium plays a role in muscle contraction and relaxation, and many people don’t get enough from their diet. Supplementing may help reduce muscle pain, particularly if your levels are low. The recommended daily intake is 310 to 320 mg for adult women and 400 to 420 mg for adult men, depending on age. If you try a supplement, magnesium glycinate tends to be easier on the stomach than other forms, which can cause digestive issues.
Good dietary sources include dark leafy greens, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. If your soreness is a chronic issue rather than an occasional post-workout inconvenience, low magnesium is worth considering as a contributing factor.
When Soreness Isn’t Normal
Typical DOMS is uncomfortable but manageable and fades within about four days. Certain warning signs suggest something more serious, like rhabdomyolysis, a condition where muscle tissue breaks down rapidly and releases harmful proteins into the bloodstream. Watch for pain that’s far more severe than you’d expect from your workout, dark tea- or cola-colored urine, and unusual weakness or fatigue where you can’t complete tasks you’d normally handle easily. These symptoms require immediate medical attention. The only reliable way to diagnose rhabdomyolysis is through a blood test, so if something feels significantly wrong, don’t try to tough it out.