You can’t completely eliminate muscle soreness after a hard workout, but you can significantly reduce it by warming up properly, managing how fast you increase intensity, eating the right nutrients, and giving your body enough time to recover. The soreness you feel 24 to 72 hours after exercise, known as DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness), happens when small tears form in your muscle fibers during unfamiliar or intense movements. Those micro-tears trigger inflammation as your body repairs and strengthens the tissue. The goal isn’t to avoid that process entirely, since it’s how muscles grow, but to keep it from becoming so severe that it sidelines you.
Why Muscles Get Sore in the First Place
Your muscles are made of thousands of tiny fibers that stretch and contract as you move. When you push harder than usual, some of those fibers tear at a microscopic level. Your immune system responds with inflammation to clean up the damage and rebuild stronger tissue. That inflammatory response is what creates the stiffness and tenderness you feel the next day or two.
Certain types of movement cause more soreness than others. Eccentric exercises, where a muscle is under tension while it lengthens, are the biggest culprits. Think of the lowering phase of a bicep curl, walking downhill, or the descent in a squat. These movements create more micro-tears than the lifting phase does. If you’ve ever felt fine after a hike uphill but could barely walk down stairs two days later, eccentric loading is the reason.
Warm Up With Movement, Not Stretching
A 10-minute dynamic warm-up before training is one of the simplest ways to reduce your risk of excessive soreness and injury. Dynamic warm-ups involve active movements that raise your heart rate, increase blood flow to your muscles, and take your joints through their full range of motion. Start with a light jog, then move through exercises like high knees, butt kicks, walking lunges with a twist, walking quad stretches, and lateral shuffles.
What you should skip: holding long static stretches before your workout. A meta-analysis of five studies found that stretching before or after exercise, even for five to ten minutes per session, had no effect on muscle soreness at 24, 48, or 72 hours. A separate analysis of over 2,600 military recruits across 12 weeks of training found no reduction in injury risk from stretching either. Static stretching still has value for flexibility, but it won’t prevent soreness. Save it for a separate mobility session or after your cool-down if you enjoy it.
Increase Intensity Gradually
The single biggest predictor of severe soreness is doing too much too soon. When you jump from no exercise to a full workout, or dramatically increase your weight, distance, or volume in one week, you overwhelm your muscles’ ability to adapt. A good rule of thumb: increase weight or total training volume by no more than 10 percent per week. If you squatted 100 pounds this week, aim for 110 next week at most.
If you’re new to weight training or returning after a long break, start at roughly half of what you think your maximum effort would be, for both weight and repetitions. This feels frustratingly easy at first, but it lets your connective tissue and muscle fibers adapt without triggering the kind of inflammation that leaves you unable to move for days. Allow at least 48 hours of rest before working the same muscle group again. Older adults benefit from training at a moderate effort level, around 6 out of 10, and keeping several reps “in reserve” rather than pushing to failure on every set.
Eat for Recovery
What you eat after exercise directly affects how quickly your muscles repair. The International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends consuming 20 to 40 grams of protein every three to four hours throughout the day, paired with adequate carbohydrates, to support muscle recovery. For overall daily intake, aiming for at least 1 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is a solid baseline. For a 150-pound person, that’s roughly 68 to 82 grams of protein spread across the day.
Carbohydrates matter too. They replenish your glycogen stores, the fuel your muscles burn during exercise. If you’re training hard or doing endurance work, the ISSN suggests 8 to 12 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight daily. Even for moderate exercisers, pairing protein with carbs after a workout (think a chicken sandwich, Greek yogurt with fruit, or eggs with toast) accelerates the repair process compared to protein alone.
Tart cherry juice has some of the strongest evidence among foods for reducing post-exercise soreness. In multiple studies, participants who drank the equivalent of about 50 to 60 cherries per serving, twice a day (morning and evening), for several days before and after intense exercise reported less soreness and showed lower markers of muscle damage than those who drank a placebo. The anti-inflammatory compounds in tart cherries appear to blunt the inflammatory spike that follows hard training. Most study protocols used 8 to 12 ounces of tart cherry juice blend per serving.
Prioritize Sleep
Sleep is when the bulk of your muscle repair happens, and even one bad night makes a measurable difference. A study of healthy young adults found that a single night of total sleep deprivation reduced muscle protein synthesis by 18 percent. At the same time, the stress hormone cortisol rose by 21 percent, and testosterone, which plays a key role in muscle repair for both men and women, dropped by 24 percent. That combination creates an environment where your body is slower to rebuild and faster to break down tissue.
You don’t need to be completely sleep-deprived to feel the effects. Consistently getting six hours instead of seven or eight means your muscles are recovering a little less efficiently after every single workout, and that accumulated deficit shows up as lingering soreness, slower strength gains, and higher injury risk. If you’re training hard, seven to nine hours of sleep is one of the most effective recovery tools available, and it’s free.
Use Foam Rolling Strategically
Foam rolling after a workout can reduce soreness without sacrificing muscle performance. Research from James Madison University found that just three minutes of foam rolling on a muscle group (about one minute per region) was enough to lower soreness scores. Longer sessions of nine minutes on the same muscle group didn’t produce additional benefits, so you don’t need to spend half an hour on the foam roller to get results.
The key is to roll slowly over the target muscle, pausing on tender spots for 15 to 30 seconds. Focus on the areas you trained hardest. For a leg workout, that means rolling the front, inner, and outer thigh, plus the calves. For upper body, target the lats, upper back, and chest. Foam rolling likely works by increasing local blood flow and temporarily reducing the sensitivity of pain receptors in the tissue, not by physically “breaking up” knots or scar tissue.
Consider Magnesium
Magnesium plays a role in muscle contraction, relaxation, and the inflammatory response. Many people don’t get enough from diet alone, and low levels are associated with more frequent muscle cramps and slower recovery. A typical supplemental dose of magnesium glycinate, the form that’s easiest on the stomach, ranges from 200 to 400 mg daily, taken with meals or before bed. It’s generally safe at those levels and may also improve sleep quality, giving you a secondary recovery benefit. It won’t eliminate soreness on its own, but if your intake is low, correcting the deficiency can make a noticeable difference in how your muscles feel day to day.
Putting It Together
No single strategy eliminates soreness completely, but stacking several of them creates a noticeable difference. A practical approach looks like this: do a 10-minute dynamic warm-up before training, increase your weights or volume by no more than 10 percent per week, eat protein and carbs within a couple hours of your workout, foam roll for three minutes on the muscles you trained, and aim for at least seven hours of sleep. Add tart cherry juice around particularly intense training days or events if you want an extra edge. These aren’t complicated interventions, but used consistently, they’re the difference between bouncing back the next day and hobbling around for a week.