Muscle Recovery
Written by Sam · Filed Under Tips 3,179 views
Muscle Recovery
Very interesting research lately provides new insight on how to recover quicker from sore muscles. It was found that low-intensity exercise on your days away from the gym actually help quicken the healing process.
The reason here is that light exercise such as walking or biking for about 15-20 minutes helps improve blood flow to your muscles all over your body. This improved blood flow in turn carries nutrients which are essential in muscle tissue recovery.
Makes sense doesn’t it? Now many people who take a rest day or two but then end up falling out of their routine have something new to consider. If you just add a quick walk to the grocery store or give yourself a break and get out of the house to relax your mind you are doing your body extra good.
This is also interesting for those who over-train at the gym and don’t get enough rest. Just keeping a one day on, one day off routine for best results can now be enhanced by doing light cardio on the off day.
Here are some extra ideas you may want to consider to help muscle recovery:
- Nutrition: Notice that in the statement above it is stated that improved blood flow carries nutrients to aid in muscle recovery. This means that you should pay special attention to eating extra healthy when you are sore so that you get all the adequate minerals, vitamins and amino acids (found in protein).
- Warm-Up/Cool Down: Leaving enough time before and after your workout for warming up and cooling down is an absolute must to allow your body to prepare for workouts and then to slow down and bring your heart rate back to normal
- Flexibility Training: Also allowing 10-15 minutes after your workout for training your flexibility is really important for relaxing your muscles and re-aligning everything.
- Adequate Sleep: You should be aiming for 7-8 hours a night, no exceptions! Sleep is absolutely essential to muscle recovery.
- Massage Therapy: I can’t stress enough how much massage therapy has helped me with muscle recovery. A registered massage therapist will know exactly where your trouble spots are and allow them to massage out all the knots. This will also improve blood flow to that area and increase recovery speed.
- Adequate water intake: Aiming for 2 liters of water a day is best practice for anyone exercising, and increasing this especially on cardio days is very smart.
- Yoga/Meditation/Relaxation: Reducing stress in your life is made easy if you practice any of these…just get rid of all your hang-ups and try them already!
Supplements which can help with muscle recovery:
What method has worked best for your muscle recovery? Please leave a comment below…
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Hey Sam,L-Glutamine has been awsome for me for recovery,along side with my Flax seed oil,or Undo’s Choice or Oil Smart byRenew Life.these oil’s are a blend of Omega3-6-9.Another great product i use is Amino Vital.This product is great for Peak Performance,and also helps in Muscle Recovery.This stuff is fantastic,You will have so much power and stamina during you workouts.Please check it out…I use 3,600 mg.It’s all Aminio Acids buddy…..
This is great advice.As exercise is key to lose weight it is always a problem to keep myself motivated when I am sore every second day from exercising.This will help me to go and exercise and not think about how sore my muscles are going to be tomorrow.
Just as Rick said, Amino Acids have been the key for me lately to delay muscle fatigue during exercise and then kick starting the rebuilding process. I have been using a product from Scivation called Extend. The apple flavor is the best…
Hi Sam,
Good advices here, thank you.
I am doing around 10_12h of Muay thai per week, and one of my trainers also told me for muscle recovery, to spend time in the shower, going hot to cold water a few times.
What do you think?
Also Do you have any specific tips on arms recovery? (for boxers as exemple)
Thanks for your website,
Kathleen
Very good idea, hot and cold water are great way to improve circulation and help your muscles recover….of course it’s a challenge dealing with the temperature changes but it definitely does work!
Have you tried massage therapy for your arms? Probably one of the best things in the world when I was kickboxing a lot!
I have been doing the opposite and working with high intensity interval training during my off days. Recovery is definitely delayed but DAMN it shreds the fat!
I find that rest is REALLY important for me, specifically, ensuring that I do not deprive myself of any sleep really helps with recovery more than I ever thought it would, sleep and a steady intake of protein gets me through my week of training.
Oh.. and a lil superpump250 never hurt anyone
-M
No, I have sometimes a oil thai massage tho…Yes I guess a specified massage would be better
Thanks