If you’re someone that works out often, you likely know how essential workout recovery is to your performance. Without focusing on your recovery efforts, you may find it difficult to maintain consistency with your workouts. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself getting sore and potentially being unable to move properly. When you work out, you experience microscopic tears in your muscle fibers. As a result, you experience delayed muscle soreness. The only way to ensure that you can maintain optimal consistency with your workouts is to keep your body well rested and recovered from the previous exercise. A lot of people fail to come up with an optimal post-workout recovery plan. This causes them to experience immense delayed muscle soreness that can keep them out of the gym. Here are some of the top tips to speed your recovery post-exercise.
Tips To Speed Up Your Post Recovery Efforts:
Drink More Water
One of the biggest culprits for many is not drinking enough water. Not only do you want to ensure that you are drinking enough water before exercise, but also during and after it. You would be surprised by the total amount of water you lose throughout the intense exercise. Getting more water into your body before, during, and after can help to replace lost hydration from sweating. This is especially important for anyone that is integrating high-intensity exercises into their daily mix whether it be CrossFit or endurance training.
Improve Your Diet
Another major factor that can contribute to your recovery efforts is your diet. Your diet will play a big role in determining how quickly your body recovers from strenuous exercise. You need to make changes to your diet if it’s not optimized for muscle recovery. Believe it or not, there are plenty of good nutrients that you can get into your diet that can dramatically improve your muscle recovery efforts. Getting foods that are high in quality protein and creatine can do wonders for your muscle recovery efforts. B-vitamins are also good to get into your diet. You will find a lot of B-vitamins in leafy green vegetables.
Sleep Better
Sleep is perhaps the most important thing you need to recover from intense workouts. A lot of people underestimate how important sleep is to your body. Not only do you need sufficient sleep, but you need quality sleep. Getting 8 hours isn’t good enough if only 4 hours are deemed quality. Because of this, you need to do things that can improve sleep. This can include sleeping earlier. It could include optimizing your room for better and less interrupted sleep. And it can include doing some relaxing activities before you lay down.
Stretch or Do Yoga
Another thing that you can do when you are looking to improve your workout recovery efforts would be to stretch after exercise. Stretching post-exercise can do wonders for your recovery efforts because you’re going to be able to get rid of the buildup of lactic acid in your muscles. Likewise, you can keep your muscles from being too stiff. This is why a lot of athletes will stretch post-workout. You can stretch yourself or do yoga after an intense workout. You can also use devices like foam rollers to get rid of lactic acid.
Take a Cold Shower
While an ice bath is preferred not many people have access to one. Because of this, you can get the same kind of results by taking an ice-cold shower. Taking a cold shower is a great way to ensure that your body heals faster from your workouts. A cold shower works in various ways. For one, it increases blood circulation throughout your body. This alone is helpful because it’s going to decrease inflammation throughout. It can also be a good way to get rid of toxin buildup that can lead to fatigue and injury.
Don’t Workout The Same Muscles In Consecutive Days
This is a common misconception that you will want to avoid. You’re not going to get bigger muscles if you overtrain. The fact is, your body does most of its growth while you are not training. You need to alternate your workouts with different muscle groups to ensure you aren’t overtraining specific muscle groups. A good way to do this is by having leg day one day and then upper body work the next. This can keep you from overtraining and giving each muscle group plenty of time to recover from the previous workout.
Take Supplements
While you want to get the majority of your essential nutrients from your diet, you can always add supplements if you cannot do so effectively. A lot of people simply cannot get the required vitamins and minerals they need through diet alone. If this is you, adding supplements can do wonders. If you’re looking to improve exercise recovery, you’ll want to add vitamin C, vitamin C, and B-vitamins to the mix. All of these vitamins help with reducing inflammation and improving your muscle recovery. You could also consider adding a simple multi-vitamin and fish oil which should cover most of your deficiencies.
Overall, there are plenty of things that you can actively do to improve your exercise recovery efforts. Follow the tips above and you will notice your muscles recovering faster and better. Be consistent with these things and you can get more and more out of each workout.
