Sore muscles after a workout typically peak one to two days after exercise and resolve within five days. The soreness, known as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), is a normal response to unfamiliar or intense physical activity. You don’t need to just wait it out. Several strategies can speed your recovery and ease the discomfort.
Why Your Muscles Get Sore
Muscle soreness after exercise isn’t caused by lactic acid buildup, despite what you may have heard. The actual process starts with microscopic structural damage to muscle fibers, particularly during movements where muscles lengthen under load (think: lowering a heavy weight, running downhill, or the descent of a squat). That damage disrupts the cell membranes, triggering an inflammatory response. Immune cells flood the area to clean up and rebuild, and the byproducts of that activity stimulate pain-sensing nerves in the muscle.
This is why soreness doesn’t hit immediately. The inflammatory cleanup peaks around 48 hours after exercise, which explains the classic pattern of feeling fine the day of your workout, then waking up stiff and tender the next morning or the morning after that. The good news: this process is how muscles adapt and grow stronger. The goal isn’t to eliminate it entirely, but to manage it so you recover faster.
Keep Moving With Light Activity
One of the most effective things you can do for sore muscles is, counterintuitively, more movement. Light activity increases blood flow to damaged tissue, which helps shuttle in nutrients needed for repair and clear out the chemical irritants contributing to pain. A large meta-analysis found that active recovery had a greater effect on reducing soreness than contrast water therapy (alternating hot and cold water), and it performed comparably to cryotherapy.
The key word is “light.” You’re not doing another hard workout. A 10 to 20 minute walk, an easy bike ride, or gentle swimming all work. Even brief sessions can help. In one study, just seven minutes of low-intensity exercise improved clearance of muscle damage markers, while a full hour of the same intensity showed no additional benefit. More isn’t necessarily better here. Keep the effort level conversational and focus on the muscle groups that are sore.
Apply Heat to Sore Areas
Heat therapy is underrated for muscle soreness. Warming sore muscles increases blood flow, which delivers glucose and amino acids needed for tissue repair while flushing out substances that sensitize pain receptors. Animal research has shown that 20 minutes of local heat application significantly reduced pain sensitivity after muscle-damaging exercise, and actually outperformed icing in that regard.
The benefits go beyond just feeling good. Increased blood flow from heat also helps replenish the energy stores your muscles burned through during exercise, supports the arrival of immune cells needed for proper tissue remodeling, and may even help preserve mitochondrial function in damaged muscle. A warm bath, a heating pad, or a hot water bottle applied for 15 to 20 minutes are all simple options. Heat works best in the days after exercise when soreness has already set in.
Try Cold Water Immersion
Cold baths and ice baths are popular for a reason: they do reduce perceived soreness. Most studies use water temperatures between 10°C and 15°C (50°F to 59°F), with immersion times averaging around 12 minutes. That said, a Cochrane systematic review concluded there’s no established “optimal” cold water protocol. Some people do continuous immersion for 10 to 15 minutes, while others alternate between one to five minutes in and out of the water.
If you find cold immersion uncomfortable, don’t force it. The evidence for heat therapy is at least as compelling for soreness relief, and it’s far more pleasant for most people. Cold immersion may be more practical after exercise in hot environments or when you need to reduce acute swelling, but for garden-variety muscle soreness, either temperature extreme can help.
Foam Roll for 15 to 20 Minutes
Foam rolling works as a form of self-massage that can meaningfully reduce tenderness. A study in the Journal of Athletic Training found that a 20-minute foam rolling session done immediately after exercise, then repeated every 24 hours, reduced muscle tenderness and helped preserve performance in multi-joint movements like jumping and sprinting.
The protocol that worked: roll each muscle group for 45 seconds, rest 15 seconds, then move to the next area. Cover all the major muscles you trained, spending about 15 minutes of actual rolling time with five minutes of rest mixed in. Use a high-density roller and apply enough pressure that you feel it working into the tissue without causing sharp pain. Quads, hamstrings, glutes, and the outer thigh are the most common areas people target for lower body soreness.
Eat Enough Protein
Your muscles can’t repair themselves without adequate building materials. The standard dietary recommendation of 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day is set for sedentary people. If you’re exercising regularly, you need roughly double that. Research consistently shows that active individuals benefit from at least 1.4 to 1.6 grams per kilogram daily to support recovery and adaptation.
For a 70 kg (154 lb) person, that translates to about 98 to 112 grams of protein spread throughout the day. Timing matters less than total daily intake. If you’re hitting your protein target across your meals, there’s no strong evidence that a post-workout shake provides additional muscle-building benefit. However, if you’re cutting calories, your protein needs jump even higher, potentially to 2.3 to 3.1 grams per kilogram of fat-free mass, to prevent losing muscle while in a deficit.
Consider Tart Cherry Juice
Tart cherry juice is one of the few whole-food supplements with solid evidence behind it for soreness. The catch: you need to start drinking it before your workout, not after. Studies show that consuming at least one serving daily for several days before a hard exercise session accelerates recovery in the days that follow. Starting on the day of exercise or afterward doesn’t appear to help.
The typical protocol in research uses Montmorency tart cherry juice, either as two servings of roughly 240 to 355 ml of juice from fresh-frozen cherries, or two 30 ml servings of concentrated juice daily. Most studies had participants begin drinking it about four days before the exercise bout and continue for a couple of days after. The natural compounds in tart cherries help manage the inflammatory response and oxidative stress that contribute to soreness.
Be Cautious With Anti-Inflammatory Drugs
Reaching for ibuprofen when you’re sore is tempting, and it will dull the pain. But if your goal is to get stronger, regular use may work against you. An eight-week study comparing people who took maximum over-the-counter doses of ibuprofen during resistance training to those who took low-dose aspirin found that the ibuprofen group gained significantly less muscle. Their quadriceps grew by 3.7% compared to 7.5% in the aspirin group, and strength gains were also lower.
The inflammatory process that causes soreness is the same process that signals your muscles to rebuild bigger and stronger. Suppressing it too aggressively, especially with daily use, can blunt the very adaptations you’re training for. Occasional use for a particularly rough day is unlikely to cause problems, but relying on ibuprofen after every workout is a strategy that trades short-term comfort for long-term results.
Stretching Won’t Help Much
Static stretching after exercise is one of the most common recovery rituals, and one of the least effective for soreness. A meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Physiology found that post-exercise stretching had a trivially small and statistically insignificant effect on muscle soreness, regardless of stretching type or the person’s training level. It also didn’t improve strength recovery, performance, or pain threshold.
This doesn’t mean stretching is useless for other purposes. It can improve flexibility over time and feels good in the moment. But if you’re stretching specifically to prevent or reduce next-day soreness, the evidence says it won’t make a meaningful difference. Your time is better spent on foam rolling, light movement, or heat therapy.
Warning Signs That Need Medical Attention
Normal muscle soreness is uncomfortable but manageable. It peaks around two days after exercise, responds to light movement, and gradually fades. Rhabdomyolysis, a rare but serious condition where muscle tissue breaks down rapidly and floods the bloodstream with cellular contents, looks different. The hallmark sign is dark, tea- or cola-colored urine. This happens because a protein called myoglobin, released from dying muscle cells, overwhelms the kidneys and can cause acute kidney damage.
Most people with rhabdomyolysis experience severe muscle pain and noticeable weakness, though the full classic triad of symptoms appears in fewer than 10% of cases. If your soreness is extreme, your muscles feel profoundly weak (not just stiff), or your urine changes color after a particularly intense or unfamiliar workout, get to an emergency room. This is especially relevant after your first high-intensity session in a long time, workouts in extreme heat, or exercise protocols that push you far beyond your current fitness level.