Exercise Recovery Methods

What Is Soreness?

First off, it is important to recognize exercise as a form of stress. When you lift weights, run, bike or otherwise work hard enough to get yourself out of the comfort zone, you're in fact causing damage to your body. That is a good thing -- as long as you allow the body to recover before stressing it again.

The reason for this is that the body anticipates the next workout, so instead of just recovering to the previous point, it adds a shade more so as to be better prepared. It is this two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach that causes muscles to grow, your lungs to become better at processing oxygen and so forth.

So let's say a muscle has a "starting value" (representing size and strength) of 100. Then you go to the gym and lift heavy weights. The workout causes muscle fibers to tear, which results in a temporary weakening and bringing the value down to 95. Over the next few days, the muscle rests and recovers back to 100, then adds another two in preparation for your next workout. Next week, you start out at 102, get weakened to 97, then recover to 104 and so forth. Result: the muscle grows stronger and larger over time.

Of course, this is extremely simplistic. In reality, many other factors play in and it certainly is not a neat and tidy development curve like this, but you get the basic idea. Likewise, you now see why it is folly to get back in the gym again before the muscle has had a chance to recover to the starting point plus two. That would be like going from 100 to 95, then hit the gym again at 98, go down to 93, hit it at 96, dip to 91 and so on. Again, that's far from how it plays in reality, but you understand why overtraining seldom leads to anything but injuries and stalled progress.

Exercise Recovery Methods

So, let's talk about what you can do to make sure your body DOES have a chance to recover properly between workouts.

Stretch your muscles thoroughly immediately after each workout. Exercise creates lactic acid and various waste products clogged up in your muscles. Meanwhile, the muscle swelling complicates blood flow, making it harder to flush out the junk. By stretching you both pull out contracted muscle fibers (increasing flexibility) and open up the pipes for a clean out. As a bonus, the fresh blood carries much-needed nutrients for the recovery process. This brings us to...

Post-workout eating is important to refill your "batteries" after a workout, since you've depleted the natural energy stores (liver and muscle tissue) and thus essentially tipped your body into a state of starvation. A starving body likes to cannibalize its muscle tissue, which is the opposite of what you want. Solution: Have a banana, protein bar or perhaps even a sugary soda -- this is the one time something with a lot of sugar is actually a good idea, since it makes the blood sugar levels bounce back quickly and halt the starvation.

Sleeping would seem obvious, but a surprising amount of modern-day adults live in a consistent state of sleep deprivation. If you sleep just 5-6 hours a night, you short-change yourself of many health benefits ranging from natural hormone production to mental alertness. It should be obvious that a rested, alert person will perform better in the gym or on the jogging trail than a worn and exhausted person, yet many otherwise smart people simply don't connect the dots.

Light exercise may sound a bit like "hair of the dog" for drunkards, but it actually makes sense. The key is to emphasize the "light" part and focus on getting the blood flowing through the sore muscle. So instead of bicep curling heavy dumbbells, grab the 10-pounders and do a few sets of high reps and carefully stretch between each set.

Supplements like glutamine and protein powder help muscles recover, for the simple reason that they are the very building blocks that make up said muscles. If you have a damaged brick wall, it makes sense to make sure you get a delivery of new bricks ASAP to make sure you have what you need on hand to get the job done.

Massage therapy can be beneficial, but mostly for the soreness itself rather than recovery speed.

There are many other exercise recovery methods out there, preaching cold water treatment, keeping the muscles under pressure and other scientific breakthroughs for pro athletes. That's fine and dandy, but that's more of icing the cake AFTER you've covered the bases outlined here. For the regular gymrat or jogger, the steps above will go far in boosting your recovery efforts. Good luck!