Hey hey readers! Glad you are here! In this third and final installment of my "Recovery in Fitness" series, I go over some evidence-based strategies that support and foster optimal recovery from your athletic and fitness training. If you haven't read part 1, which gives an overview of what recovery means in the fitness world, click here to read it. Also, in part 2, I go over what happens physiologically in your body during recovery, so check that out too - click here.
If you have followed and read my content over the past few years, you know that I have talked quite a lot about my history and experience with recovery practices as they relate to fitness. I have always been a long-distance runner, but I did not engage in any type of recovery work until about 5 years ago. My fitness and athletic endeavors (running, cycling, swimming) have soared to highs that I never thought possible when I was younger. And this is because of my recovery work. Now that I am strategic with my nutrition, sleep, stretching, rolling, and yoga, I can train further and longer and harder than ever before. My body also feels younger than ever before, which is pretty amazing considering I am 41 years old. I crave my recovery work nowadays, and I am just as much dedicated to my recovery practices as I am to my actual physical training of running, swimming, and cycling.
In this blog post, I will give a basic overview of some the more commonly used recovery strategies that bring about incredibly positive impacts on health and wellness. Of course, this blog post is not an exhaustive list by any means; there are some other recovery strategies that exist that I am not covering in this post simply because they are outside my personal scope of experience. Thus, the strategies described in this post are the ones I am most familiar with. I hope you find these strategies helpful for your recovery from your physical fitness training.
In this post, I will go over the following evidence-based recovery strategies:
Refueling/nutrition
Rehydration
Sleep
Yoga
Breathwork
Stretching
Self-massage
Social connection
Stress management
Refueling/Nutrition
Refueling nutrient-depleted muscles and tissues is arguably the most important recovery strategy that an athlete (professional or recreational) can employ. And conversely, NOT refueling after a workout could be one of the worst things to do to delay or impair your recovery. So, why is refueling after your workout so important? Well, recall from part 2 of this series that there are essentially two phases in recovery - the initial "homeostasis recovery," where your body works to reestablish your baseline patterns and rhythms, and the delayed "adaptive recovery," where your body works to make cellular and tissue changes in order to better overcome future training stresses and workouts. Thus, your nutrition right after the workout supports that homeostasis recovery, and your nutrition in the few days following a workout supports the adaptive recovery stage. The nutrition you refuel with provides your body with the building blocks and raw ingredients needed for all the cellular processes occurring in both phases of recovery. In the homeostasis recovery stage, refueling helps you replenish your depleted fuel stores as well as beginning to repair cellular damage from the training. In the adaptive recovery stage, your nutrition helps you to better adapt by providing ingredients for new and stronger tissues and cells to be built.
Carbohydrates are needed following a training session so that you can replenish depleted glycogen stores (i.e. storage form of glucose in the body) in the muscles and liver. This is especially true for distance runners and other endurance athletes, as endurance activities tend to run the glycogen tank down to empty. While your body will work to replenish your glycogen stores whether you eat a post-workout snack/meal or not, post-workout refueling helps that glycogen synthesis process to occur must faster, especially if carbohydrates are consumed within 30-60 minutes following your workout. You might wonder how much carbohydrates you should consume after your workout. There are some variances to this data, but in general, the recommendation is that you should consume about 0.7 grams of simple carbohydrate (sugar/glucose) per pound of body weight within 30 minutes after your workout, and then every 2-6 hours afterward. I'll be honest, I do not measure out my food in grams and in comparison to my body weight. Rather, after a long run/swim, I typically have a glass of Fair Life chocolate milk, a low-fat yogurt, or a piece of cheese with some gatorade, and that seems to work well in my body.
What about protein? Well, glad you asked, as protein in super important for adequate recovery. Protein helps your body repair muscle fiber damage from your workout in the homeostasis recovery window. And during the adaptation recovery phase, protein provides additional amino acids to be used to build new tissues, cells, enzymes (to accelerate metabolic reactions), and cell organelles (e.g. mitochondria). If you want your body to adapt and repair from your training, protein is essential. Without adequate protein, your body will be unable to repair your tissues sufficiently, increasing your risk for overtraining and injury. The general recommendation is for you to consume 20 - 30 grams of a complete protein (i.e. containing all essential amino acids) within 30-60 minutes after your workout. As stated above, I get my refueling nutrition, including protein, from a glass of low-fat chocolate milk or yogurt after I do a long-run or swim. In fact, chocolate milk is a great post-workout refueling strategy since liquids absorb more quickly than solid foods.
Refueling is not just about what you eat immediately following your workout; rather, it's about what you consume day-in and day-out that really affects how you adapt to training. If you eat a healthier, more whole-foods-type diet, you will likely recover, and adapt, faster and more efficiently than if you ate a crappy diet of soda, chips, and fast food. Since training can be very tough on the body, resulting in some type of inflammation, healthier food choices provide your body with vitamins and minerals in addition to carbohydrates and protein. Healthy food choices with higher amounts of antioxidants are preferable, such as dark chocolate, berries, oranges, almonds, sweet potatoes, salmon, and stir-fry veggies. Antioxidants help reduce free-radical damage in your tissues and cells as well as helping reduce your inflammation from hard training.
Rehydrating
So, we've talked about protein, carbohydrate, and vitamin/mineral replenishing after a workout, but what about hydration/water? Well, water is actually very important and vital for many chemical reactions that occur inside your cells during your actual workout and in both recovery stages. During your workout, your body uses your available water, depleting your reserves and requiring you to rehydrate. For instance, sweating causes you to lose body water, and this can lower your blood volume, and ultimately your cardiac output (aka how much blood your heart can pump out in a minute). This lowered cardiac output reduces the amount of oxygen that gets to the muscles, and if you recall from part 2 of this series, recovery processes are aerobic, meaning that they require oxygen to operate and run. Thus, rehydrating is super important for not only reestablishing your blood volume levels but also to allow your body better oxygen delivery to the cells undergoing the homeostatic and adaptive recovery processes. The general recommendation for runners re: rehydrating is to drink 0.5 liter of water/sports drink per pound of body weight lost during the run, immediately following the workout. Some data suggests that an electrolyte drink with sodium might be best for rehydrating since the additional sodium stimulates your kidneys to retain water in your body. You can use the color of your urine as a rough estimator of your hydration status, with more clear urine indicating better hydration in your body. I personally prefer plain, cold water after a long run/swim/ride. Similar to protein/carbohydrate, I am not super picky about measuring my body weight loss, but instead, I just drink enough until my body says I have had enough.
Sleep
Sleep is the optimal time for the body to heal itself from your training. In fact, sleep is crucial for not only physical fitness training, but also for helping your body consolidate memories from your day (including studying), so that you are able to remember events and information from your life. Without adequate sleep, your body can experience disease, injury, severe mood shifting, altered appetite, and so so much more. When we sleep, our brain physiology and nervous system can restore to normal levels, and our hippocampi (plural - the thin-ish, c-shaped structures in the midbrain area) can transform our daily experiences into long-term memory. Sleep also allows anabolic processes to occur (i.e. building tissues) via the secretion of testosterone and growth hormone, while suppressing catabolic processes (i.e. breaking down tissues) and the associated cortisol release. Lack of sleep then will actually cause your body to continue to break down rather than build up. Of course the general recommendations we hear about usually say about 7-9 hours of quality sleep, and in a perfect world, yes, that would be great. But, life isn't perfect, and sometimes your schedule may only allow 5-6 hours of sleep. If that is the case, just try to make that amount of sleep as restful as you can. And when you can get a longer night's rest, try to do so. Just remember, if you want to adapt and build up new tissues, enzymes, and organelles in your body for future training, you must must must sleep and rest.
Yoga
If you have followed my content for the past 5ish years, you know that I am an avid yogi and highly highly recommend yoga for everyone. Yoga has changed my life in so many ways, for the better. Yoga is a holistic practice that aims to unite your physical body, mind, and breath, so that each of those parts of you can work together, in synchrony, so you feel and move your best. There are many styles of yoga, with some styles involving physically demanding postures and sequences, like hot yoga, power yoga, and vinyasa flow-type classes. For recovery purposes, though, I would recommend sticking to either gentle yoga, yin yoga, and/or restorative yoga. Gentle yoga uses more simple yoga poses (e.g. cat-cow, seated spinal movements, etc.), and the pace is usually slower with more time allotted to settle and rest in each pose. More challenging physical postures are usually omitted from gentle yoga. Yin yoga is where various poses and stretches are held for a longer period of time, usually about 5-ish minutes, and this can be great for allowing the physical body to settle and soften, while stretching your tissues very well. Yin yoga is basically like deep, long stretching. Restorative yoga, which I have written about before (click here) and love so so much, is essentially where you use a ton of yoga props (click here to read more about yoga props), allowing the props to hold your body in different poses, while you linger in that shape for 10-20 minutes. Restorative yoga is fabulous for recovery of any kind, including fitness, injury, emotional, etc.
Breathwork
Breathing exercises are another great way to recover, and a absolute, constant staple in my daily routines. Our respiratory muscles and our breathing patterns tend to get a little disrupted and wonky during our hard physical training, so breathing exercises focus specifically on restoring the respiratory muscle function and coordination, while simultaneously smoothing out and reorganizing the breath itself. Plus, there a ton of benefits on the nervous system from breathing exercises, which will help accelerate your recovery. My go-to breathing exercises for recovery include:
Equal parts breathing - inhale and exhale are the same length, usually 5-8 seconds for me
Extended exhalation - exhale is longer than inhale, usually 5 sec inhale with an 8 sec exhale for me
Square breathing - inhale for 4 sec, hold breath for 4 sec, exhale for 4 sec, and hold breath again for 4 sec, repeat
Diaphragmatic breathing - inhale through nose, focusing on full belly inflation, exhaling out mouth through pursed lips, focusing on complete belly deflation. I wrote an earlier blog series about belly breathing (aka diaphragmatic breathing), so if you are interested, you can check that out here.
Breath awareness - this is actually a very powerful breathing exercise. In breath awareness, you simply observe your natural breath without doing any specific type of exercise. You just watch and feel your body breathe, however it's choosing to breathe in that moment, without judgment or ridicule. Just compassionate and mindful awareness. There is some really good scientific evidence that just 5 minutes a day of breath awareness practice can improve like a million things in your body. Check out Pubmed for more research on this if interested.
Breathwork can be done in isolation and/or as a part of your yoga practice. I actually do both - sometimes I do just breathwork itself, and other times, it is part of my larger yoga practice on a given day. I generally aim for 1-2 sets of 5-10 reps of whatever breathing exercise I am doing. Breathing exercises are great because you can literally do them anywhere - in the shower after your workday, in the car while sitting in traffic, while waiting in the grocery line, etc. If you are not doing some type of breath work or breathing exercises, I highly encourage you to begin, perhaps with breath awareness.
Stretching
Many people think that stretching is yoga, and that yoga is stretching. But, in reality, yoga and stretching are not at all synonyms. Yoga is holistic, involving full mental focus, awareness to the body and breath, with sequences of poses that allow the practitioner to move with this full focus/awareness, while cultivating a sense of harmony and ease with ourselves and the environment around us. While stretching may be part of a yoga practice, and it often is, stretching by itself is not yoga. Stretching is really just a biomechanical act of increasing flexibility in the tissues via different joint movements. But of course breathing and focus are important in stretching, as they are in yoga, so that is a similarity between the two practices.
There are many types of stretching. I wrote a blog post about the different forms of stretching, so if you are interested, you can check that out here. In general, though, stretching is a great way to release tightness and kinks in your muscle and connective tissues from your training. Stretching after a long run is an absolute must for me. I typically focus on my hips, trunk, and shoulders when stretching after a workout. If I am just stretching (not doing yoga), then I generally just stretch on the floor (not on my mat), often with the tv on, while engaging with my family. However, if I am including stretching into my yoga practice, I am on my mat, with all distractions gone (e.g. tv off, phone ignored), focusing just on my practice.
Self-Massage
I have written quite a lot about self-massage with therapy balls. Self-massage, aka self-myofascial release, has become increasingly more popular through the years. Self-myofascial release involves the use of therapy balls or other roller type objects, placed on the different muscles in the body, to help release tension and tightness in muscles and surrounding tissues, while also improving blood flow and general cellular health in those tissues. I am a very big advocate for having a rolling practice, as it's often referred to. I even teach a class on rolling (aka self-myofascial release), so if you are near Cumming, GA, come check it out sometime. I teach on Tuesdays at 6:30pm at MOVE+breathe (click here). I also wrote an earlier short blog series about myofascial rolling, so if interested, click here.
Social Connection
I believe taking time away from work and fitness training to simply laugh, bond, and connect with your friends and family is huge for improving your recovery. Of course all the other strategies we have already discussed are important, but it is also so necessary to take time to let go, let loose, and enjoy the people you love. That is absolutely a form of rest, and it helps you remember that you are not alone, and that there are many people who love you and support your goals. Social connection is a great way to restore and repair your body from your intense training. It gives you a break from thinking about and planning your training. But, be careful that your social connection time is not filled with unhealthy habits, such as drinking a ton of alcohol or engaging in unnecessary amounts of drama.
Stress Management
Minimizing unnecessary stress in your life is hugely important for your recovery from your training. If you are under chronic stress from work and/or life, and then you add more stress to your body from your training, you will likely end up overtraining and getting sick or injured. Stress is so damaging to the body and mind. Of course there will be situations where you feel stress because that is simply part of life, but if you are feeling stress all the time in your life, without much break or relief, realize that that can really make you sick over time. Evaluate what stressors really matter for you, and save your energies for those, and allow yourself to let go of the rest. You don't have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders at all times. You too deserve a break. And in fact, if you really are under massive amounts of stress right now, first of all give yourself some love and grace because that is TOUGH, but know that you really need recovery time. It will help you navigate the stress better. And for those stressful situations that you must think about (e.g. finances, raising children, retirement planning, etc.), find avenues to help you process and deal with the stress, such as meditation, prayer, yoga, breathwork, or even doing a fun hobby, such as reading or bird-watching.
Summary
Well thank you so much for sticking with me until the end. As you can see, there are many different practices and strategies that you can do to aid in your recovery. Remember, without adequate recovery, your body will not adapt, or will adapt very little, to your training. This puts you at a much higher risk for injury, overtraining, or pain. Please consider putting forth the same effort into your recovery work that you do for your physical training. If you do not do strategic recovery work, you simply will not reap the benefits from all your training and hard work. Do not feel like you have to do every single recovery strategy described here, each and every time after a workout. On the contrary, choose and implement the strategies that work best for you and your life on a day-to-day, week-to-week, or even month-to-month basis. Just try to include some type of recovery into your training so that you can push harder, train harder, and recover better. Thank you for reading!!
As always, the information presented in this blog post is derived from my own study of human movement, anatomy, and yoga. If you have questions about recovery work for your body, please follow up with your physician, physical therapist, or personal trainer. If you are interested in private yoga and/or personal training sessions with me, Jackie, email me at info@lotusyogisbyjackie.com for more information about my services. Also, please subscribe to my website so you can receive my monthly newsletters (scroll to the bottom of the page where you can submit your email address). This will help keep you "in-the-know" about my latest blog releases and other helpful yoga and wellness information. Thanks for reading!
~Namaste, Jackie Allen, M.S., M.Ed., CCC-SLP, RYT-200, RCYT, NASM-CPT, NASM-CES
References:
Roundtree, S. (2011). The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery – Rest, relax, & restore for peak performance. Velo Press. Boulder, CO.
Karp, J.R. (2022). Foundations and Applications of Running Technique and Programming. International Sports Sciences Association. Phoenix, AZ.
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