The Perfect Workout Recovery Day
A closer look at some protocols that will not only ensure that you keep your post-workout aches and pains to a minimum while also allowing your body to gain better fitness and strength from that killer workout that landed you in this hot and sweaty mess.
Brock Armstrong
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The Perfect Workout Recovery Day
Since I published the article “6 Reasons Recovery is Essential to Your Exercise Routine,” I have received several questions from readers looking for more information on how to properly recover. So in this article, we are going to look at some protocols that will not only ensure minimal levels of post-workout discomfort, but also allow your body to recover quickly and gain better fitness and strength from being the dedicated mover and lifter that you are.
Why Workout Recovery Is Important
As you learned in the previously mentioned article, our fitness builds, our muscles grow, and we become fitter and stronger when our bodies are placed under a certain amount of stress. Then, during the recovery period after a workout, the body repairs its fibers and builds new blood vessels to the stressed area. In addition, the energy-generating components of our cells develop a better work ethic and even our bones step it up a notch.
But—and this is a big but—none of these adaptations will occur if the body is not allowed to get the rest and recovery it needs. Basically, exercising without recovering is a bit like trying to cook a steak without turning on the grill: you go through all the steak cooking rituals, but your meal is still going to be served raw.
Often when I tell an athlete that they need to take a recovery day they panic and think I am telling them that they need to stay in bed or lay on the couch with a box of bonbons. That rings alarms in their well-trained brains. But that’s far from what I intend for them to do. What I prefer is something called Active Recovery.
What Is Active Recovery?
The activity known as active recovery is simple. Rather than letting all that inflammation, swelling, and muscle damage simply sit there like a lump after you have crushed a hard workout or race, you move the muscles instead.
An active recovery includes easy workouts that are the equivalent of no more than 60 percent of your maximum effort (in other words, very low to moderate intensity). This type of movement helps the muscles stay loose and can bring more blood flow to the areas with damaged tissue. This can help them heal faster and allow you to bounce back more quickly.
Circulation of blood in and out of a stressed body part improves the speed of recovery. Techniques that can improve blood flow include cooling down after your workout, taking a walk or easy bike ride, performing light stretching during or after each workout, alternating between warm and cool running water during your post-workout shower, taking an ice bath after a weight training workout or hard run, and performing a light jog, swim, or easy exercise routine the day after a hard workout.
Active recovery has also been shown in studies to help your immune system by moving what is known as lymph fluid around your body. That can make you less likely to get sick after a tough event or workout.
The Recovery Day
When one of the athletes that I coach sees “Recovery Day” in their schedule it usually reads something like this:
This is not a day to lay on the couch or to make up for a missed workout, today is a day to actively focus on recovery.
Morning: Start with 10-15 minutes of foam rolling and massage ball. Hunt for every tight/sore spot and roll it out. Next, move on to 10-15 minutes of gentle movement, stretching, and deep breathing.
Afternoon/Evening: Choose any or all of the following depending on time.
- Cold/hot contrast shower (20 seconds cool, 10 seconds warm, 10x times through for a total of 5 minutes).
- 30 minute sauna.
- 20 minute ice bath/cold water soak.
All day: Eat and Hydrate well. Focus on a variety of veggies, a decent amount of protein, and add in a few more carbs than usual (avoiding inflammatory refined sugars).
So with that in mind, let’s examine those techniques, and a few others, in detail.
My Top Workout Recovery Tips
1. Foam Roll
You can check out the article called “The Many Benefits of Foam Rolling” for more info on this but I also want to tell you about a study that was published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that investigated whether foam rolling could reduce soreness and boost recovery. This study looked at how a foam rolling protocol affected soreness following a squat workout.
Twenty men were split up into two groups and both groups underwent a pretty serious squat workout that included ten sets of ten back squats at 60% of one-rep squat maximum. After the squats, both groups were evaluated for their soreness level, quadriceps and hamstring range of motion, performance during a vertical leap test, and measurements of muscle electrical activity. After these tests, half the men did a foam rolling routine and the other half hit the showers.
The study concluded that the foam rolling had three effects.
- It significantly reduced muscle soreness.
- It caused a significant increase in quadriceps range of motion.
- It led to better performance in a vertical leap test.
Another study at Memorial University of Newfoundland looked at the immediate benefits that you get when you finish a foam rolling routine. In this study, after only two minutes of foam rolling, quadriceps range of motion had increased by ten degrees, where the control group, who did not foam roll, only saw an increase of one degree.
What makes foam rolling decrease soreness, speed up recovery, and increase range of motion? Well, it comes down to movement of connective tissue. While exercise damages connective tissue, which stimulates pain receptors and inhibits muscle activation, using a foam roller helps repair damage to your connective tissue. This has a direct effect on decreasing soreness and preventing a drop in performance after a hard workout.
2. Hot or Cold Therapy
The second thing listed on my “recovery day” workout is some hot or cold therapy. I include this for a few reasons. One being that growth hormone is crucial for repair and recovery of muscles and research has shown that two 20-minute sauna sessions, separated by a 30-minute cooling period, elevated growth hormone levels two-fold over baseline. Two 15-minute sauna sessions at an even warmer temperature separated by a 30-minute cooling period resulted in a five-fold increase in growth hormone. Which is pretty important.
Perhaps even more important is that repeated exposure to whole-body, intermittent hyperthermia (or overheating) boosts growth hormone immediately afterward, and two one-hour sauna sessions for seven days have been shown to increase growth hormone up to 16 times.
Adding to the recovery is that a sauna also increases blood flow to the skeletal muscles, which helps keep the muscles fueled with oxygen, amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose while simultaneously removing byproducts of metabolic processes such as lactate and calcium ions.
Then there are the benefits to your immune system. In Germany, sauna medical research showed that heat therapy is able to significantly reduce the incidences of colds and influenza. And both Finnish and German studies show that regular sauna bathing leads to a 30% lower chance of getting a cold and influenza.
On the other side of the temperature spectrum, a cold water soak after a workout enhances the recovery of muscle function. But—and this again is a big but—cold water plunges immediately after training also appears to impair long-term muscular adaptations to resistance training. In a nutshell, a cold bath may help you get movin’ in the short term but it may be at the cost of all those long-term adaptations.
In any case, science still shows us that cold water exposure can restore muscle contractile function and reduce soreness following collision sports like rugby. And both cold water immersion and hot/cold contrast therapy can help restore force production after performing some high intensity interval training.
Cold water immersion also helps cyclists maintain their high performance when they are training hard on consecutive days. And basketball players who use cold immersion recover from their games and maintain a higher jump height.
3. Good Food and Drink
The last “workout” on my recovery day list is to eat and hydrate well because working out expends energy (calories) and that energy must be replenished before you are able to fully recover and get yourself ready for another workout.
A friend and mentor of mine, Marks Sisson, always says “eat the carbs you earn.” While that often means eating fewer carbs, it can also mean eating more—if you’ve trained hard enough to warrant them.
It is important to remember that what you replenish depends on the type of exercise that you engaged in. If you went for an easy bike ride or a long walk that burned primarily body fat, obviously you don’t want to worry about replenishing that! But if you just crushed a 30-minute full body (insert brand name) session that left you feeling weak as a kitten and sweaty as a Florida Gator, then you probably have some glycogen (carbohydrate) stores to refill in your liver and your muscles.
Eating inadequate calories coupled with some intense exercise sessions can eventually send a “we’re in trouble” signal to the body. This can cause the body to down-regulate our anabolic hormones. So, instead of growing the lean mass that we want and burn the body fat that we don’t want, this state of “starvation” can actually cause muscle atrophy and body fat retention. Not what we are looking for at all!
As far as protein goes, I am going to quote Monica Reinagel, The Nutrition Dive, from her podcast episode called “How to Build More Muscle with less Protein.”
“Building and repairing muscle tissue requires protein—and that’s a nutrient that our bodies have to use as it comes in; we can’t store it for future use. Whenever we eat foods containing protein, we get a little burst of muscle-building activity. The amount of muscle you build is dependent on the amount of protein you take in at that meal. Eat a little protein, build a little muscle. Take in more protein, build more muscle…but only up to a point.”
The research done by Douglas Paddon Jones of the University of Texas shows that muscle protein synthesis (your body’s ability to use protein effectively) peaks at about 30 grams of protein per meal. Anything above that is largely wasted in terms of its muscle-building benefit. So, that amount is a good amount to aim for whether you are using the preferred source of real food protein, a protein powder, or you are getting it in bar form.
Dehydration is also one of our recovery enemies.It is advised that you try to drink one 20-24oz bottle of water for each hour of exercise you are engaged in. Notice that I didn’t say sports drink, energy drink, or soda—I said water. There is a great book on this subject by Tim Noakes called Waterlogged, and I recommend you read it if you are still very much a slave to the sports drink industry. Suffice to say that if you get some good food (which contains many vital minerals) and water in your belly, you will be headed in the right direction.
Other Recovery Tips
Here are some other quick and dirty workout recovery tips that you can also try.Â
4. Wear Compression Garments
Check out the article called “The Best Way to Use Compression Gear” for some extra info on this but a recent meta-analysis called Compression Garments and Recovery from Exercise looked at all of the available research and concluded that compression garments can indeed enhance muscle recovery after strength training and also improve next-day cycling performance.
5. Lotions, Creams, and Salves
There are several sticky, slippery, and gooey compounds that you can rub on a sore muscle to alleviate the soreness and help improve recovery. Most of these goops work by creating a pain-relieving and cooling sensation, which can increase blood flow, or even displace elevated levels of by-products like calcium.
6. Reduce Your Stress
Researchers at the Yale Stress Center recently published a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that confirms that “mental stress” impairs workout recovery. Thirty-one undergrads were assessed for stress levels using a bunch of psychological tests, then engaged in a heavy lower body strength workout. An hour after the workout the students in the high-stress group had regained 38 percent of their leg strength, while students in the low-stress group had regained 60 percent of their strength. That’s nearly double the recovery!
Yes, I know that some stress is unavoidable in this modern world but many of us seem to create or seek out additional stress in our lives. We also fail to do enough to counter or manage it through things like mindfulness practice, breathing, yoga or simply unplugging occasionally.
7. Get Some Sleep
Carrying a sleep debt can impair exercise recovery by increasing cortisol, lowering testosterone, and lowering muscle protein synthesis. It can also impair recovery by disrupting slow wave sleep, the stage of sleep which shows a peak in growth hormone secretion. Growth hormone is know to heal tissues and rebuild muscles. Sleep deprivation has also been linked to muscular atrophy and reduces muscle strength.
8. Avoid Alcohol
That post workout or race beer directly impairs muscle protein synthesis which is an essential step in recovery and adaptation to training. Even a single day per week of binge drinking is linked to 4x the risk of sarcopenia (muscle-wasting). I probably don’t need to tell you that it is hard to recover from your workouts if your muscles are atrophying.
9. Get a Massage
Not only does a massage feel great but evidence shows that it is absolutely awesome for recovery from exercise. The only reason I don’t include it in my own personal “recovery day” workout is that it can be costly. But if you can afford it, your health plan covers it, or you are willing to splurge, it has been shown to alleviate DOMS and speed up the recovery of muscle strength and enhances proprioception. It also has been shown to improve central nervous system parasympathetic/sympathetic balance, and this was true even if it was a massage device (not a human) who was doing the work.
There are of course many more pieces to the recovery puzzle, but I hope this gives you enough information and knowledge so that the next time you have a hard workout or race, you will resist the urge to simply flop on the couch. Instead, I hope you try some active recovery, foam rolling, hot or cold therapy, gooey balm, replenishing carbs, or any number of other options listed in this article. If you do, I guarantee that you will recover faster, better, and be feeling the recovery benefits in no time.
For more rest day info, recovery tips, and to join the fit conversation, head over to Facebook GetFitGuy or twitter getfitguy. Also don’t forget to subscribe to the Get-Fit Guy podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play or via RSSopens XML file .
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.Â