5 Ways To Recover After Exercise
5 Ways to Recover after exercise
Recovery is a crucial step to making your workout count. A muscle needs anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to repair and rebuild, and working it again too soon simply leads to tissue breakdown instead of building. So we wanted to give you 5 easy tips to recovery-
1. Warm Up and Cool Down
Short-term recovery is crucial to maintaining and improving performance and preventing injury in all levels of athletic training. Short-term recovery, sometimes called active recovery, includes the lower intensity cool-down phase after a tough workout as well as an entire rest day that involves low-intensity exercise like walking, stretching or yoga or other cross training. Short-term recovery also requires replenishing energy and fluid lost during exercise and getting adequate sleep. After a tough workout, consider gentle stretching. This is a simple and fast way to help your muscles recover.
2. Refuel Right
Nutrition plays a huge role when it comes to recovering after a workout. After depleting your energy stores you need to refuel to allow your body to recover, repair tissues and improve muscle strength. If you are exercising multiple days in a row this is even more important. Ideally you should consume a high quality protein (see here) within 60 minutes of exercising.
3. Sleep
Sleep quality before and after exercise is important. Researchers suspect that it is deep sleep that helps improve athletic performance because this is the time when growth hormone is released. Growth hormone stimulates muscle growth and repair, bone building and fat burning. While you sleep, amazing things are taking place in your body. Optimal sleep is essential for anyone who exercises regularly. During sleep, your body produces Growth Hormone (GH) which is largely responsible for tissue growth and repair.
4. Replace Lost Fluids
You lose a lot of fluid during exercise and ideally, you should be replacing it during exercise with an intra workout, but filling up after exercise is an easy way to boost your recovery as well. Water supports every metabolic function and nutrient transfer in the body and having plenty of water will improve every bodily function. Adequate fluid replacement is even more important for endurance athletes who lose large amounts of water during hours of sweating.
5. Avoid Overtraining
One simple way to recovery faster is by designing a smart workout routine in the first place. Excessive exercise, heavy training at every session or a lack of rest days will limit your fitness gains from exercise and undermine your recovery efforts.
Time is one of the best ways to recover from just about any illness or injury and this also works after a hard workout. Your body has an amazing capacity to take care of itself if you allow it some time. Resting and waiting after a hard workout allows the repair and recovery process to happen at a natural pace. It's not the only thing you can or should do to promote recovery, but sometimes doing nothing is the easiest thing to do.
So grab your Muscle Protein supplements, and put these steps in place to recover right!