Top 3 Active Recovery Workouts
Learn three of the best active recovery workouts, which will help you bounce back faster from any hard exercise.
Ben Greenfield
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Top 3 Active Recovery Workouts
The day after I completed the Spartan Agoge, a brutal 48-hour event in frigid temperatures at 40° below zero (which you can read about here), I posted on Twitter that I was “looking for a gym” and one reply was “Don’t you take any days off?”
My reply back?
Active recovery rules.
So, what was my “active recovery” after the Agoge?
Before my flight home, I hit the Equinox gym in Boston for a mix of sauna yoga, hypoxic underwater swimming, foam roller, mobility band, aerobics, and light weight training.
In this episode, you’ll learn why I decided to do that rather than simply take the day off to watch Game Of Thrones on the couch, and you’ll get my top three active recovery workouts.
What Is Active Recovery?
The concept of active recovery is quite simple. In a nutshell, rather than letting inflammation, swelling, and muscle damage simply sit there after you’ve done a hard workout race, you instead move the muscles, massage the muscles, and even introduce more blood flow into specific areas of damaged tissue so you heal faster and so that you’re better able to bounce back more quickly.
Active recovery also helps move your immune system’s lymph fluid to move around your body, so that you’re less likely to get sick after a tough event.
My Top 3 Active Recovery Workouts
1. Foam Roller
A study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, investigated whether foam rolling could reduce soreness and boost recovery by looking at the impact of a foam rolling protocol on soreness following a squat workout.
In the study, twenty men were split into two groups. Both groups underwent a fatiguing squat protocol, with ten sets of ten back squats at 60% of one-rep squat maximum. After the initial bout of squats, both groups were evaluated for their soreness level, quadriceps and hamstring range of motion, performance on a vertical leap test, and measurements of muscle electrical activity. After the post-squat soreness and range of motion tests, half the men did a foam rolling routine and half didn’t.
The foam rolling had three effects. First, it significantly reduced muscle soreness. Second, it caused a significant increase in quadriceps range of motion. And third, it led to better performance in a vertical leap test.
Another study at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada looked at immediate benefits you get within a few minutes of finishing a foam rolling routine. In this study, after only two minutes of foam rolling, quadriceps range of motion increased by ten degrees, but less than one degree after a control trial with no foam rolling. This increase in range of motion stuck around for at least ten minutes after the foam rolling.
So what’s the mechanism via which foam rolling decreases soreness, speeds up recovery, and increases range of motion? It all comes down to manipulating connective tissue. Exercise damages connective tissue, which stimulates pain receptors and inhibits muscle activation. Using a foam roller can help repair damage to your connective tissue, thus decreasing soreness and preventing a drop in performance after a hard workout.
Click here for one of my favorite foam rolling routines.
2. Sauna
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.
Perhaps even more nifty is that repeated exposure to whole-body, intermittent hyperthermia through sauna use boosts growth hormone immediately afterward, and two one-hour sauna sessions for seven days have been shown to increase growth hormone by 16-fold. Yeah, that’s right: you don’t need to go buy fancy supplements or creams to increase growth hormone. You can just make your body hot instead and get a growth hormone increase.
It is also important to note that when hyperthermia and exercise are combined, they induce a synergistic increase in growth hormone, which is why I do yoga, push-ups, and squats in my infrared sauna. For an additional recovery benefit, sauna also increases blood flow to the skeletal muscles, which helps to keep them fueled with glucose, amino acids, fatty acids, and oxygen, while removing by-products of metabolic processes such as lactic acid and calcium ions.
In a report in The Annals of Clinical Research Volume 20, Dr. H. Isomäki discusses research results that show benefits of sauna for relief of pain and increased mobility. In the study, the pain relief induced by a sauna was attributed to an increase in the release of anti-inflammatory compounds such as noradrenaline, adrenaline, cortisol and growth hormones, as well as an increase in positive stress on the body, causing it to releases natural pain-killing endorphins. More than 50% of participants reported temporary relief of pain and an increase in mobility, most likely due to the fact that tissues comprised of collagen, such as tendons, fascia, and joint articular capsules, become more flexible when exposed to increased temperatures.
Then there’s the benefits for your immune system. The Journal of Human Kinetics recently investigated the effect of sauna use on the immune system, specifically white blood cell profile, cortisol levels and selected physiological indices in athletes and non-athletes. The subjects from both a sauna group and a control group participated in 15-minute sauna sessions until their core temperature rose by 1.2°C.
After the sauna session, an increased number of white blood cells, lymphocyte, neutrophil and basophil counts were reported in the white blood cell profile, showing that sauna use stimulates the immune system (and interestingly, a greater benefit to the immune system was shown in the athletes vs. the untrained subjects, indicating that an excellent one-two combo for your immune system is exercise and sauna use). German sauna medical research also shows that saunas are 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% less chance of getting a cold and influenza.
3. Swimming & Hypoxia
Of all forms of active recovery, swimming is probably my favorite. A study in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness looked at three recovery methods in elite male adult swimmers: massage, active recovery, and passive recovery.
The study showed that all three recovery methods resulted in a significant decrease in blood lactate, but concluded that swimming was the most efficient method at clearing blood lactate, followed by massage, and finally passive recovery (laying around!).
Another study in the International Journal of Sports Medicine looked at the performance of nine triathletes after they performed an interval run of 8×3 minutes at 85% to 90% of VO2 max speed on two separate occasions. Ten hours after this brutal run protocol, they either swam 2,000 meters or laid down for an equal period of time. Then, fourteen hours after that, the same triathletes performed a high-intensity run to fatigue to see how well their running performance had recovered from the previous day’s workout.
The impressive results showed the athletes had an improvement of 14% in their run time to fatigue after swimming compared to lying still, along with a decrease in the levels of c-reactive inflammatory protein, which shows that swimming for recovery enhances subsequent run performance by decreasing tissue inflammation.
When you add breath holds and “hypoxia” or less breathing and less oxygen availability to your swimming protocol, you enhance your results even more. Hypoxic training not only strengthens respiratory muscles, but also results in:
improvements in oxygen uptake, transport and utilization.
production of neuroendocrine hormones that can have an anabolic training effect.
improvements in immune system strength.
increased activities of antioxidant enzymes in the brain, liver, heart and other organs (assuming you don’t overdo it, in which case you actually get suppression of normal antioxidant processes).
increased production of red blood cells, resulting in an increased oxygen carrying capacity of the blood.
You can check out the science to back those claims about hypoxia up here, and you can read all about what hypoxia is and how to use it properly in an article I wrote about how to use it to enhance endurance and recovery.
So that’s it! Next time your sore after a hard workout resist the urge to simply sit on the couch or skip the gym, and instead try some active recovery! Do you have questions about any of these three active recovery workouts, or your own to add? Join the conversation at Facebook getfitguy.
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.