A vital part of your workout routine is rest and recovery. Your recovery routine after an intensive workout has a massive influence on your sports performance and fitness gains.
This lets you train better and more effectively. Regrettably, several people don’t have a recovery plan after workout. We’ve compiled some tips to help you in this regard.
Importance of Recovery
Recovery after an intense workout is important for strength building including muscle and tissue repair. This is even more important especially if you just finished an intense weight training session.
Ideally, muscles need between 24 – 48 hours to rebuild and repair itself. For this reason, putting it to work again sooner than you should would lead to severe tissue breakdown.
The tips below will come in handy if you want to stay active and recover faster at home.
Replace Lost Fluids
Your body loses lots of fluid in the course of exercise. Preferably, you should replace it while working out. However, filling up after your workout routine is a fast way to enhance recovery.
Eat Healthy Foods that Aids Recovery
Exercise depletes your energy stores so you need to refuel for your body to recover, get stronger, repair tissues, and get in shape for subsequent challenges.
This is more critical if you’re carrying out endurance exercise every day or if you want to build your muscles.
Rest and Relax
Time is the best way to heal or to recover from any injury or illness. This also works after an intense workout. The human body has an astonishing ability to repair itself as long as you give it time.
You need to rest after a hard workout as this lets the process of repair and recovery take place at a natural pace. This isn’t the only thing you should do to improve your recovery. There are times where you simply need to do nothing to achieve the best results.
Stretch It Out
Try gentle stretching after a rigourous workout. This is a fast and easy way to help the muscles recover faster.
Carry out Active Recovery
Gentle and easy movement like bike ride or a brisk walk increases circulation, which helps stimulate nutrient and the transport of waste product all through the body. Theoretically, this helps the muscles refuel and repair faster.
Get a Massage
Massage improves circulation and it also feels good. Most importantly, massage allows you to relax fully. There are several foam roller exercises and self-massage tools that can ease tight muscles.
Take an Ice Bath
Some athletes prefer ice massage, ice baths, or contrast water therapy – this involves interchanging cold and hot showers – to reduce muscle soreness, recover faster, and prevent injury.
The aim of this method is to repeatedly dilate and constrict the blood vessels which helps to remove waste products found in the tissues.
