We don’t really know very much about the link between muscle damage and central nervous system fatigue. In this article, I explain as much as we know at the moment. I suspect that the effect is a sliding scale, rather than a threshold effect, because there are cases of 1, 2, and even up to 8 days of central nervous system fatigue being observed after varying amounts of muscle-damaging exercise.
Yes, I do think that a number of factors (such as ROM and volume) will contribute to damage (and the contribution of each of these will vary between muscles because of their characteristics, if you look at my triceps and biceps articles, as well as between individuals). For example, muscles containing muscle fibers that work mainly on the ascending limb and plateau region of the length-tension relationship are less likely to be affected by ROM than by volume.
