6 Reasons Recovery is Essential to Your Exercise Routine
Rest and recovery days are important for both your athletic performance and your fitness progression for a variety of reasons. Let’s break it down and find out what exactly goes on when you give your body the correct amount of rest.
Brock Armstrong
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6 Reasons Recovery is Essential to Your Exercise Routine
Most of you fit folks know that you need to get some rest after exercise but many of you still feel lazy or even guilty when you do allow yourself to finally take a day off. Even if you know in the back of your head that the body repairs and strengthens itself in the time between your workouts (not actually during the workouts themselves), still, your recovery time is often the first thing to be skipped in any training program.
Full recovery is defined as your ability to meet or exceed performance in a particular activity.
At its base, full recovery is defined as your ability to meet or exceed performance in a particular activity. That is the definition that is used in scientific papers that are devoted to recovery, anyway. I think that definition is a little basic and kind of confusing, so let’s break it down.
Imagine that you did a really hard run workout yesterday like my favorite: Eight repeats of two-minutes all-out and four-minutes easy. After you do that workout (and until you’re recovered) your ability to run a personal best ten-kilometer race is going to be reduced. That is no big surprise. But once you allow your cells, blood, bones, muscles, joints, and nervous system to bounce back from the physical strain of crushing that workout, you will once again be able to nail that 10k. Plus you will be able to train harder, train longer, and simply feel better when you get out of bed in the morning.
Not to mention, perhaps most importantly, that every time your body bounces back in this way, you get more fit.
In a nutshell, exercise (or any other heavy physical work for that matter) causes changes in the body like muscle tissue breakdown and the depletion of energy stores (muscle and liver glycogen) as well as more basic things like body fluid loss. Your recovery time is the time when your body adapts to the stress of exercise and is also when the real training effect takes place.
Some things that happen during recovery are physiological and some are psychological. But whether it is in your body or in your head, recovery is a vital part of getting fit and staying fit. So vital, in fact, that having too few rest and recovery days can put you in a state of under-recovery which can then lead to overtraining syndrome, which is a condition that can be truly difficult to recover from.
What is Under-recovery?
Simply put, when you are in an under-recovered state and you continue to workout, you are wasting your training time.
Simply put, when you are in an under-recovered state and you continue to workout, you are wasting your training time. You are training for the sake of training, with little-to-no change in performance or improvement in fitness. If you are chronic under-recovering, you will never actually get any faster, stronger, or happier with your performance.
When you’re under-recovered, you are like a hamster on its little exercise wheel, doing a lot of exciting movement without making any forward progress.
If you continue this way, you will eventually end up sick, injured, or so overtrained that you have to take weeks or months off to recover.
Two Categories of Fitness Recovery
There are two categories of recovery:
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Short-term recovery from a particularly intense training session or event,
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Long-term recovery that needs to be built into a year-round training schedule.
Both of these types of recovery are important for optimal fitness.
One part of Short-term recovery is called Active Recovery and that is simply engaging in low-intensity exercise after your workout is over, during both the cool-down phase as well as during the days following the workout.
Another part of the short-term recovery is the replenishing of energy stores and fluids that are lost during exercise. This also involves optimizing protein synthesis by increasing the protein content of muscle cells which can help prevent muscle breakdown and aids in increasing muscle size. This short-term recovery is done by eating the right foods and rehydrating in the hours and days after a hard workout.
Long-term recovery techniques refer to those recovery periods that are programmed into a training program and are often more passive than the short-term ones. Although, as we will learn later, they don’t necessarily involve laying on the couch, binging Netflix, and eating Debbie Cakes. A good training schedule will include recovery days and easy weeks that allow your body to recover without getting stale. These periods are as essential to a fitness program as the heavy workout days and the hard training weeks.
Both the short-term and the long-term recovery are important to our body’s adaptation to exercise.
Adaptation to Exercise
When we undergo the stress of physical exercise, our body adapts and becomes more efficient. That is known as the Principle of Adaptation.
This can be viewed in the same way as learning any new skill. At first, it is awkward and takes a lot of thought and energy but the more you do it, the easier and more automatic it becomes.
But there are limits to how much stress the body can tolerate before it breaks down. Doing too much too soon can result in injury or muscle damage. At the same time, doing too little too slowly will result in disappointment. That is why we coaches and trainers build programs that increase time, distance, and intensity at a specific rate and then build in rest days throughout the program to reap the benefits of all that hard work.
Balance Exercise with Rest and Recovery
It is the alternation between adaptation and recovery that moves the athlete to higher and higher levels of fitness.
It is the alternation between adaptation and recovery that moves the athlete to a higher and higher level of fitness. The higher the training intensity and effort, the greater the need for planned recovery.
This is where monitoring and recording your workouts in a training log, plus paying particular attention to how your body feels and how motivated you are, is extremely helpful in determining your recovery needs and modifying your training program accordingly.
What Happens During Recovery?
Ok, we have danced around this for long enough! What actually happens in your body when you are recovering from a hard workout.
1. Muscle Recovery
When you workout, your muscles take a beating. This is especially true if you do an impact-based workout or a workout that involves some deceleration, like running or weight training. Every time you strain your muscles with exercise, there is trauma to the muscle fiber. On a certain level, you are basically injuring yourself over and over again.
But this is actually a good thing due to a phenomenon called “hormesis.” Hormesis is a biological reaction where a beneficial effect occurs in response to exposure to a low dose (or doses) of an agent that could be otherwise toxic or lethal at a higher dose. Think of the Dread Pirate Roberts exposing himself to small doses of Iocane powder.
Exercise could actually kill you if you do it enough, but in controlled doses, exercise bestows what we call hormetic benefits. That is if you take time to recover.
Researchers at McMaster University and the Washington University School of Medicine looked into this and found that muscle protein synthesis increases by about 50 percent for four hours after a workout.
The repair process seems to peak about 24 hours after a workout, at which point muscle protein synthetic rate was actually elevated by 109 percent. But by about 36 hours after the workout, the whole process was pretty much complete, and the muscles were back to a ready-to-rock status.
That study was done on “healthy, trained males of university age” so depending on your age, gender and training status, your recovery time may vary. I simply included those recovery durations to demonstrate that it can (and does) take more than a few hours for full recovery in any of the body’s systems that we are addressing today.
2. Blood Recovery
Angiogenesis is what scientists call the process of creating new blood vessels from pre-existing blood vessels. When you work out, your muscle contractions increase angiogenesis, and then during the recovery period, you produce new blood vessels and also the capillaries that feed all your hungry muscle cells.
Numerous studies have shown that capillary density actually increases in response to training and recovery. Researchers have also found increases in reticulocyte counts (new red blood cells) during a taper period following hard workout weeks and months. This is a strong indicator that recovery is an important part of erythropoiesis (red blood cell production) and we all know that having more red blood cells is kind of the Holy Grail for many athletes.
Another cool adaptation that takes place in your blood is an increase in eosinophils, which are the white blood cell components that can remove some of the inflammation causing substances in the body as well as an increase lymphocytes (white blood cells that fight infection). This is one reason why people who are under-recovered tend to get sick more often.
3. Cardiovascular Recovery
Another important part of recovery is something called (EPOC) Exercise post oxygen consumption. You can find out more about that in the article called Is the Theory Behind Orangetheory Fitness Flawed in the section about the “afterburn.”
Like a high-interest credit card, an unpaid oxygen debt is not a debt you want to incur.
Basically, when you have a short and intense burst of exercise like sprinting or doing a Tabata workout, you generate energy for the effort anaerobically (without oxygen). The difference between the amount of oxygen your body required during the effort and what it was actually able to gobble up is called “oxygen deficit.” When you stop sprinting and start to recover (and continue to breathe hard) you will actually need more oxygen to recover than your body can grab in a few minutes or hours. This is called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and is an important factor in being able to nail your next workout or exercise session. Like a high-interest credit card, an unpaid oxygen debt is not a debt you want to incur.
4. Bone Recovery
Consistent physical activity can modify connective tissue (cartilaginous, fatty, and elastic tissues) which will allow your body to make significant bone remodeling and increase bone density. This is the reason why one of the best methods to maintain current bone mineral density is through physical activity.
Physical activity increases the physical stresses on bone, and when the stressful stimulus is complete (and the bones are allowed to recover) all of that bone flexing stress that you engaged in can help activate cells called osteoblasts, which help the bone stay strong and resilient.
But the opposite is also true. Repetitive bone stress without adequate recovery can result in bone breakdown and loss of bone density. Repetitive stress without recovery can also deplete the body of essential bone-building minerals and vitamins—although this would be an extreme circumstance.
5. Metabolic Recovery
A study at McMaster University divided well-conditioned runners, averaging about 50 miles of running per week into three groups and had all the runners go into some version of a recovery mode. During this recovery mode, one group simply relaxed for a week, the second group ran easy for 18 miles over the course of the week, and the third group ran a measly six miles during the week that consisted of all-out 500-meter intervals on a track. So their workouts were quick and dirty, just like me.
After this recovery week was over, all three groups performed a treadmill “run to fatigue” test, some blood tests, and a muscle biopsy. The results went like this: the “did nothing for a week” group improved by three percent, the runners who logged 18 easy jogging miles improved their performances by six percent, and the runners who ran the six miles of 500-meter intervals saw performance increases of 22 percent.
This tells us that recovery is important but that you don’t have to hit the couch with a box of bonbons to get the full benefits.
So, what went on metabolically that caused these changes? The researchers found that the low-volume but high-intensity runners had:
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More glycogen (storage carbohydrate) in their leg muscles
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More aerobic, oxidative enzymes in their legs
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Higher red blood cell density
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Higher blood plasma
So this may seem confusing at first, but if we look closely, we see that all three of the groups improved during this recovery week but the biggest gains happened in the group that had plenty of rest with just a few fun bursts of exercise during the week. This tells us that rest and recovery is important but that you also don’t have to hit the couch with a box of bonbons to get the full or even the best benefits.
6. Nerve Recovery
What we refer to as the central nervous system (CNS) includes your brain and spinal cord as well as the part which connects to your muscles via a thing called the peripheral nervous system.
This is how it works: When you want a muscle to contract (on purpose or as part of an automatic cascade of movement), a message travels from the brain and spinal cord and eventually arrives at the individual muscle motor units through something called a neuromuscular junction. This is where the muscle receives the message and gets activated.
In the same way that the muscle itself can fatigue (and get torn and injured) the training can also damage your nervous system. Sports scientists call this neural fatigue, and it can really drain your central nervous system, as well as the local nerves in the muscle sites themselves.
This fatigue happens when your body releases things called inflammatory cytokines (tiny chemical messengers) in response to the muscle damage that is brought on by your training. These cytokines attach themselves to the receptors in your central nervous system and in an oversimplified way, block your neural recovery.
Unlike muscle damage, and this is very important to keep in mind, nerve fatigue doesn’t just come from training. It can come from other nervous system stressors like lack of sleep, pharmaceuticals, caffeine, alcohol, or other day-to-day stresses. Because your nervous system is the machine that makes all of your muscles fire, if your nervous system is under-recovered, then not only the strength but also the basic functioning of your muscles is messed up. This is why you can still get overtrained, or be in a state of under-recovery, even if you’re not exercising excessively, but perhaps partying, working long hours, or sleeping poorly.
If your nervous system is pooped out, it is pooped out.
It is important to remember that your central nervous system doesn’t differentiate between your muscle groups. If your nervous system is pooped out, it is pooped out. So let’s say that you do a hard bike ride today, and then head to the gym tomorrow to lift some heavy stuff, even though you mostly worked your legs on the bike ride you may still find that your strength doing an overhead press is wimpier than usual. That is nervous system fatigue.
Alright! There we have it. This was by no means a comprehensive recap of what I learned during my coach certification classes but hopefully I outlined enough of the benefits (and detriments) of recovery that you will reconsider ignoring your next rest day to instead squeeze in “just one more workout.”
When you’re under-recovered, your ability to positively adapt to your training is zapped, and—in addition to putting yourself at risk of illness and injury—you really are wasting your precious training time. I don’t know about you, but I want results when I train.
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About the Author
Brock Armstrong was the host of the Get-Fit Guy podcast between 2017 and 2021. He is a certified AFLCA Group Fitness Leader with a designation in Portable Equipment, NCCP and CAC Triathlon Coach, and a TnT certified run coach. He is also on the board of advisors for the Primal Health Coach Institute and a guest faculty member of the Human Potential Institute.