Recovery is important. You train to break your body down……..and your body supercompensates by building back to being stronger and fitter.
Here is Part 2 of this series……….you can catch Part 1 by CLICKING HERE (if you missed it)
4. Active recovery
As I said in part 1 – stretching can help recovery. Take it one step further? Do an ‘active recovery workout!’
Beware – this should NOT cause soreness!
Keep things light, and add stretches in liberally……….and don’t go too heavy or place emphasis on eccentric portion of reps (or eliminate that if you can)
Get the blood flow going……work the lungs a little……..do not push yourself hard (You will want to train hard the next day!)
5. Contrast shower
This IS exactly how it sounds.
Get a hot shower………and every now and then set it to as cold as you can handle for maybe 20-30seconds……..back to hot.
Do this several times!
Not pleasant!
The mechanism behind this is that this will stimulate more blood flow to the muscles…….and if you are eating the right things – then you should in theory recover more quickly.
6. Supplements.
While I touched upon experiementing with Magnesium flakes in your bath in PART 1 – There are other supplements that are known to help.
I have not tried these personally (other than magnesium) – but here is a resource that you might want to check out if you either:
a) Really struggle to sleep
b) Constant fatigue
c) Constant soreness
Then CLICK HERE to see a post that recommends some tools.
By the way…….if you are not already aiming to get more sleep and still wasting time watching things like Geordie Shore etc – get your priorities right BEFORE looking at any supplements.
By the way – if looking for a protein supplement – Do not waste money on low-calorie crap with soy protein in. (Check the ingredients – as I hear of people selling people really expensive soy protein shakes that just has too many question marks over it…..and anything low calorie will have you lose weight – but then REBOUND with WEIGHT gain.)
I like this whey protein (click) but if you don’t tolerate milk protein well – then go for a pea, rice, or hemp protein.
7. The obvious – Sleep!
As you will probably guess or know – my sleep as been massively interupted recently, and I can’t wait for the elusive 6-month time where apparently children sleep right through EVERY. SINGLE .NIGHT.
The benefits of sleep are well documented (CLICK) – and I typically find that less sleep makes me hungrier than Homer Simpson after 24 hours of Intermittent fasting………
Also, can I just add that watching less TV and getting to bed earlier is just a good idea. No matter how you spin it…….ditching the soaps, saving that film to the weekend – all mean you can get that much-needed sleep after a hard day at work.
For a more in-depth coverage of sleep CLICK HERE and HERE for some great articles from the guys at precision nutrition.
So there you go! Train hard – recover better so you can train harder!
John