Sometimes, the day after a challenging workout can be a struggle. Your muscles are sore and that makes it hard to get in and out of your car (if you can get to your car in the first place). But there are ways to ease the pain from a good workout and speed up your recovery.
Rest and recovery is an incredibly vital part of any workout routine. Your after-exercise recovery routine has a huge impact on your fitness gains as well as sports performance. In addition, it allows you to train much more effectively. Unfortunately, most individuals don’t have an after-exercise recovery plan.
Recovery after exercise is absolutely essential to muscle and tissue repair as well as strength building. This is even more critical to add into your routine after a heavy weight-training session. A muscle needs somewhere from 24 to 48 hours to repair and rebuild, and working it again too soon just leads to tissue breakdown instead of building. What this means for weight-training routines is that you should never work out the same muscle groups two days consecutively.
There are many methods of recovery. The following are some of the most commonly recommended by fitness experts.
Drink Enough Fluids
Hydrating after a workout is essential to recovery. Without sufficient amounts of water present in your body, you won’t be able to bounce back as well as take benefit of all of the hard work you’ve just done.
Water provides many benefits for your body, including:
- Carrying nutrients as well as oxygen to your cells, and
- Regulating body temperature.
Without proper hydration, it’s difficult for your body to normalise blood pressure and stabilise your heartbeat. You’ll reap the rewards of your tough workout when you drink water.
Get More Sleep
With the exact relationship between sleep and exercise still being unclear, research suggests that sleep deprivation can have a very negative effect on exercise performance and recovery.
Sleep affects the whole body in addition to all its systems, including the:
- Brain,
- Heart,
- Lungs,
- Metabolism,
- Immune function,
- Mood, and
- Disease resistance.
So getting extra sleep after a tough workout might do more than you know to speed your body’s recovery.
Eat Healthy Recovery Foods
After depleting your energy stores with exercise and physical fitness activities, you need to re-fuel if you expect for your body to recover, repair tissues, become stronger as well as be ready for the next challenge that you want to tackle. This is even more essential if you are doing endurance exercise the day after day or trying to build muscle.
The essential thing that you can do, in order to recovery quickly, is to listen to your body. If you are feeling like you’re tired, sore, or notice decreased performance you may require more recovery time or a break from your training routine altogether. If you are feeling like you’re strong the day after a hard workout, you don’t need to force yourself to go slow. In most instances, your body will let you know what it requires when it needs it.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
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