Is it true that muscles don't grow without pain?

Many people consider muscle pain a prerequisite for muscle growth. The scheme is simple: muscle fibers are damaged, the body speeds up protein synthesis to repair them, and at the same time builds up a little more to protect against subsequent stress.

If this theory is correct, after each workout a person should feel pain, otherwise the load was insufficient and it should be increased. In fact, this approach can lead to the opposite effect for several reasons:

• Delayed muscle pain reduces their ability to generate strength, so you can do less the next workout.
• Constant pain is exhausting and reduces motivation to study.
• Inadequate exercise can lead to overtraining and hit your performance hard.

Gradually, new studies are emerging, proving that there is no connection between repairing muscles after damage and their subsequent growth. While science has yet to provide a definitive answer to this question, there are reasons not to consider pain as the only indicator of good training.

Why muscles grow and how they are damaged

Repetitive muscle contractions during exercise cause mechanical stress. It starts the process of adaptation of the body to the load - it gives a signal for the completion of fibers. The more tension you create, the more stimulus your body will have to grow.

But if the load is too high or the muscles are not ready for this, their fibers are damaged, inflammation and swelling build up, tissues squeeze receptors in the muscles and you feel pain.

Thus, mechanical stress is to blame for both muscle growth and muscle damage.

However, these are two different processes that can occur both simultaneously and separately from each other.

Why recovery and muscle building are not the same

There is some evidence for this theory, both scientific and empirical.

Increased turnover of protein after injury does not cause hypertrophy

After injury, a person's turnover is stimulated squirrel: both production and decay. It is believed to help build muscle fibers. However, there is an opposite point of view: protein turnover increases not to increase their volume, but to repair damage.

Due to the increased decay, the body cleans out the damaged parts of the muscle fibers, and thanks to synthesis, it restores them or regrowth them.

The body simply repairs what has been broken, and this does not in any way affect the emergence of new muscle fibers.

This assumption was confirmed in the studyResistance training-induced changes in integrated myofibrillar protein synthesis are related to hypertrophy only after attenuation of muscle damage. Scientists have found that increased protein turnover in the early stages of strength training, when muscle damage is most severe, does not result in muscle fiber hypertrophy.

Eccentric exercise may not cause pain

Eccentric exercises are those in which the muscles are stretched under stress; concentric - when they contract. For example, if you swing your biceps with dumbbells, then the raising of the arms is a concentric phase, and the lowering is an eccentric phase.

Some studies showSkeletal Muscle Remodeling in Response to Eccentric vs. Concentric Loading: Morphological, Molecular and Metabolic Adaptationsthat eccentric training causes more muscle growth than concentric training. In doing so, they create severe delayed muscle pain.

However, eccentric training may not be painful.

This was confirmed by the studyMuscle damage and muscle remodeling: no pain, no gain? with two groups of participants. One of them worked on an eccentric ergometer for three weeks for 5 minutes, and then began an eight-week program of more serious training of 20 minutes.

The second group immediately proceeded to the main loads, without preliminary preparation. And as a result, people in it experienced muscle pain, but in the first they did not. At the same time, they all gained muscle and strength equally.

Activation of progenitor cells does not increase the number of nuclei in the muscle

After injury, the activation of progenitor cells increases in the muscles. It is assumed that this leads to the creation of new nuclei in muscle cells and, as a result, the appearance of new fibers.

However, researchEarly- and later ‑ phases satellite cell responses and myonuclear content with resistance training in young men refuted this dependence. It turned out that at the beginning of the power program, when the damage muscle the most severe, the number of nuclei does not grow, despite the activation of progenitor cells.

Not all muscle damage coincides with growth

Since both growth from mechanical stress and pain from the same stress occur at the same time, it is difficult to separate them from each other.

To do this, scientists came up withRegenerated rat skeletal muscle after periodic contusions damage muscles without mechanical stress and see how this affects growth. The results confirmed that despite the damage, no muscle gain occurred without exercise.

Some muscle groups do not hurt, but they grow

For example, deltoid musclescovering the shoulder joint or the muscles of the forearms rarely hurt after exercise, even for beginners. However, they still increase in size under the appropriate load.

Muscles are more likely to hurt in those who exercise irregularly

At the same time, the results in strength and muscle building are much better for those who do strength exercises regularly.

Don't judge the quality of your workout by the amount of pain.

If nothing hurts you, this does not mean that you did not work well and the results will stand still. It is better to be guided by the volume and growth of the weights in strength exercises.