5 Proven Tips to Maximize Exercise Recovery

Boost your exercise results with these simple strategies.

Recovery is arguably more important than the exercise itself.

Even if you’re not an “athlete”, you are still a human being, and human beings need to recover.

“We are bombarded with stress every day — physical activity is just a drop in the bucket.” — Ben Greenfield

If we don’t recover, we won’t grow or improve. It’s so hard to prioritize recovery when all we want to do is get stronger, get bigger, get leaner, and get quicker. But we won’t achieve any of this without intentional recovery.

The time away from exercise is where our bodies grow and rebuild, and adapt to the stresses we’ve placed on them. Furthermore, without adequate recovery, we also risk doing more harm than good.

“In an effort to overcome inactivity when they’re not exercising, some people are overtraining. Exercise is a stressor.… when stress exceeds your ability to adapt, it stops having a beneficial, hormetic effect and begins to cause damage.” — Chris Kresser

How to Recover From Exercise

1. Take days off

This may be an obvious point, but is worth reiterating nonetheless.

I think this is something we don’t give enough importance to, but is the lowest hanging fruit in regards to recovery and making progress.

We can’t exercise every single day and expect to not only make improvements but to also not get sick. Overtraining, adrenal fatigue, and burnout can all follow relatively quickly if we don’t take rest days.

So how long do we need to rest?

Ben Greenfield explains:

“Do strength-training workouts that target the same muscle groups at least forty-eight hours apart. Muscles take at least that long to recover…. And it’s important to know that your central nervous system doesn’t differentiate between muscle groups. If it’s fatigued, it’s fatigued. So if you do a hard run today, then head to the gym tomorrow, you may find that you can’t press as much weight overhead: Unless you run on your hands and shoulders, that’s not muscle fatigue, it’s nervous system fatigue. Low-level, aerobic cardio doesn’t really create as much neural fatigue as high-intensity cardio and sprints, which is why you should alternate aerobic and anaerobic sessions during the week if you want to allow for prime neural recovery.”

Takeaway: Rest for at least 48 hours between higher intensity bouts, even if using different muscle groups.

2. Active recovery

Active recovery has been shown to lead to better recovery than doing nothing.

Active recovery is where we’re moving our bodies at a low intensity, which encourages blood flow and helps our tissues to heal more quickly:

“The benefit of staying active — versus lounging on the couch for hours — is that you’ll keep blood flowing so you can get rid of the metabolic waste that accumulates in your tissues after a hard workout. “It’s like flushing out a car engine,” McCall explains. Moderate-intensity activity will also boost your circulation, introducing new oxygen and nutrients into your muscles, he adds.” — NBC News

Some examples include:

Walking
Gentle yoga
Chores around the home
Playing catch with your kids
Massage
Mobility work
Stretching

3. Sleep

Without good quality sleep on a regular basis, we won’t be able to recover properly. So much of our recovery occurs during sleep.

Make sleep a priority. Here’s how:

Keep a consistent sleep/wake schedule
Get morning light exposure as soon as you wake up
Avoid screens and overhead lights after sunset

You Don’t Need to Sleep More. Focus on Sleeping Better

10 ways to improve your sleep quality.

medium.com

4. Eat Adequate Calories

We can’t grow and improve if we’re not refueling our bodies.

Even if you’re looking to lose weight, you still need to eat enough to sustain your activity levels. Otherwise, again, you’ll face issues such as adrenal fatigue and overtraining.

Unless you’re on a keto diet, healthy carbohydrates can play an important role in this. Chris Kresser explains:

“Eat carbs after training and eat more on training days…. some recent studies suggest that eating the majority of your [[carbohydrates]] at dinner leads to hormonal changes that promote [[Fat loss]] and improve metabolic function…. in practice, if you aim for eating a larger percentage of your [[carbohydrates]] after workouts, on workout days, and then the later part of the day, you’ll get most of the benefit of carbohydrate timing.”

If you are trying to lose weight, check out this article for how to calculate how many calories you should be eating to ensure you’re still eating enough.

Or, even better, try other ways to lose fat that don’t involve counting calories:

10 Ways to Lose Fat Without Worrying About Calories

Ways to burn fat that don’t involve paying attention to what you’re eating.