In most cases, yes. Moderate soreness by itself isn't a signal to skip your next session. A foundational review in Sports Medicine looked at delayed onset muscle soreness, the dull, tender ache that shows up roughly a day after unfamiliar or eccentric-heavy exercise, and found it typically peaks between 24 and 72 hours afterward, then resolves within about a week without any specific treatment being required. That timeline matters more than it sounds, because it means soreness is a predictable, self-limiting response, not a sign your body needs an extended break.
The short answer
Ordinary post-workout soreness is not a reason to skip training. It's a normal response to unfamiliar or harder-than-usual movement, and it resolves on its own within about a week regardless of what you do about it. What actually matters is telling that ordinary pattern apart from something sharper or more localized, which is a different signal entirely and does call for backing off.
What delayed onset muscle soreness actually is
The review, published by Cheung, Hume, and Maxwell in Sports Medicine, describes DOMS as the result of microscopic damage to muscle fibers, most pronounced after eccentric contractions, the lengthening phase of a movement, like the lowering portion of a squat or a slow step down. The damage triggers a local inflammatory response, which is what produces the tenderness and stiffness, not tissue destruction in any concerning sense. Soreness typically isn't felt during the exercise itself. It builds over the following day, peaks somewhere in the 24 to 72 hour window, and fades out over the days after that.
Soreness peaks a day or two after training and fades within a week, on its own, whether or not you do anything about it.
When training through it is fine
If the soreness is the ordinary, symmetrical, dull kind, tender to the touch, uncomfortable on stairs, but not sharp or one-sided, training through it is generally fine. The review found that interventions like a warm-up before resistance exercise can modestly reduce soreness in some muscle regions, but critically, none of the tested strategies reliably restored the strength loss that comes with the initial damage; that recovers on its own over the same roughly week-long window regardless of what you try. In practice, that means there's no special trick required. A normal session, at a normal or slightly reduced intensity if the soreness is significant, works as well as anything else tested.
This surprises people who assume soreness is a stop sign. It isn't, and treating it as one tends to do more harm than good over time, since skipping every session where you're a little tender adds up to skipping a meaningful share of your training. The review's broader point is that the various recovery interventions people reach for, foam rolling, ice baths, massage, stretching, produce modest and inconsistent effects on the soreness itself and essentially no effect on how quickly strength returns. None of them are harmful, but none of them are required either. The muscle recovers on its own timeline regardless of which of these you add on top.
When soreness means something different
DOMS shows up a day after training, not during it. Pain that starts mid-set, a sharp or localized ache rather than a general muscle-wide tenderness, or noticeable swelling around a joint are outside the normal pattern and point toward a strain or another injury rather than ordinary soreness. The same goes for soreness that keeps getting worse past the 72-hour mark instead of easing, or that hasn't started to fade at all within a week. None of that is the pattern the research describes as typical DOMS, and it's worth having checked rather than trained through.
There's also a practical middle ground worth knowing about, distinct from either training normally or stopping entirely. Light movement, walking, gentle mobility work, or a lower-intensity version of the same activity, doesn't appear in the review as harmful during a sore stretch, and mild activity is generally well tolerated even while muscles are tender. The decision that actually matters is between ordinary DOMS, where movement is uncomfortable but safe, and the sharper, more localized signals above, where the right move is to stop and get it looked at rather than guess.
Where protein and training frequency fit in
Two things make the soreness question less relevant day to day: how often you're actually training, and whether you're giving your muscles enough protein to work with. Research on preserving muscle during weight loss, covered in does strength training preserve muscle during weight loss, points to two to four sessions a week as the range that captures most of the benefit without demanding daily training on tissue that hasn't recovered. At that frequency, any single session's soreness has largely resolved before the next one rolls around, which sidesteps most of the should-I-train-through-this question before it comes up.
How OffRamp helps
OffRamp's home strength sessions are built around that same two-to-four-times-a-week frequency, so soreness from one session has time to follow its normal course before the next. Paired with a daily protein floor, the sessions have the material they need to make the underlying tissue repair count, rather than adding volume on top of a muscle that hasn't had a chance to recover. If a session ever produces pain that's sharp, one-sided, or shows up during the movement itself rather than the next day, that's a different signal than the ordinary soreness this research describes, and it's worth stopping and having it checked by a doctor rather than pushing through on the assumption it will pass on its own.
