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Have you ever pushed yourself physically and the following day felt like you have been hit by a Mac Truck and wondering what the best workout recovery protocol is?
That is kind of what I feel like today.
This past weekend I ran the New England Half Marathon and when I woke up Monday morning I immediately knew that I was not feeling my best.
The first clue was the soreness as I got out of bed and made my way to the bathroom. My calves, hip flexors, and my quads were all pretty sore.
As I always do every morning, I then measured my heart rate variability or HRV. If you are not familiar with HRV it is a way of using the intervals between heart beats to assess how stressed you are. You can learn more about what HRV is and how to use it here and here. As you can see in the picture below my heart rate variability was not so good for the day. For context you generally want your HRV score higher than your heart rate. A good score for me (everyone will be individual) is in the 65-70 range with a heart rate in the high 50s. (I should also note that I need to take my HRV standing up because my heart rate is too low to get an accurate reading when I am sitting or lying down.)
In addition my lowest resting heart rate only lowered to 42 overnight while I was sleeping (normal for me would be in the high 30s) and the average across the night was 47 (normal for me would be in the low 40s).
My body temperature was also slightly elevated compared to normal which is yet another sign of the body being stressed.
After being up for 30 minutes or so I still felt like I wanted to crawl back in bed (which really wasn’t an option unfortunately) so I decided I needed to alter my plan for the day to facilitate more recovery.
This is probably not an uncommon situation for people who exercise or are training for some kind of competition. At some point you will likely over extend yourself. That in itself is not a bad thing assuming it happens infrequently and you allow yourself proper recovery. However the question most people are left asking in this situation is what do you do to facilitate proper recovery from a hard workout or competition?
Well wonder no more!
This blog post will outline the top things you should be doing when you need to prioritize recovery from a hard workout or competition. I have ordered the interventions in this blog post in order of priority. The lower down on the list you go the less impact these will have on your recovery.
First on our list of recovery modalities is sleep.
Sleep: The Cornerstone Of Any Post -Workout Recovery Strategy
If you have a hard exercise or training session the best thing you can do to recover from that session or competition is to get great sleep. If anything compromises your sleep then it will compromise your recovery. Sleep is not only the cornerstone of recovery but it is also the cornerstone of health!
One of the top complaints people will have after they overextend themselves physically is that they are sore. This sore feeling is technically called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS. DOMS is basically damage to the muscle that comes when you over exert that muscle. One of the best ways to reduce DOMS is to get enough sleep (Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Acute Skeletal Muscle Recovery After Exercise, n.d.).
In addition to sleep relieving the pain from muscle damage, it also impacts your hormonal response from exercise that is necessary to repair and grow. Inadequate sleep can alter your hormonal profile in a way which will hinder recovery. The primary mechanism for this dysregulation appears to be raising of cortisol which throws off your testosterone to cortisol ratio (Kindermann, n.d.).
Cortisol is considered catabolic because it breaks down muscle while testosterone is anabolic because it is critical for building muscle.
While this is true you should not be afraid of cortisol being high, in fact we want our cortisol to rise at certain times as it is important for our health and survival. However what we don’t want is chronically elevated cortisol because then it will hinder the recovery process.
In addition to providing the right hormonal environment to facilitate recovery from a hard training session or competition by sleeping right, your body needs the right nutrients in order to repair the damage and grow back stronger.
Diet: Providing The Nutrients To Recover And Grow
The most important nutrient to facilitate recovery is going to be protein. As we discussed above DOMS occurs because you have damaged your muscle and the number one thing you need to repair that damage is protein. Protein contains the building blocks of muscle.
So in the hours after your hard training session or competition you want to make sure you get in about 20-40 grams of protein.
Now is it crucial that you get in that protein immediately after?
No, for the most part the rush to consume protein after competition or exercise is not necessary. However if you want to begin the repair process as soon as possible it won’t hurt to make an effort to get in some protein. If that means just having a small shake soon after the session and waiting to have a formal meal including protein a few hours later that is perfectly fine.
The main point here is that your body needs the protein to begin the repair process so you don’t want to skimp on protein after the session and you don’t want to wait an extended period of time either.
It is also going to be important that the protein you consume is a complete protein, meaning it should have all the necessary amino acids. Consuming collagen or a plant protein that does not contain all the essential amino acids will likely not do much to facilitate recovery.
Any kind of whole food animal protein is pretty much guaranteed to be a complete protein. If you want to use a protein supplement post training session or competition a whey, casein, or essential amino acid supplement (not branch chain amino acids) would also work fine. If you are going to use a plant protein then you will need to make sure you have the correct combination of sources to ensure you have the proper amino acid profile.
Outside of protein, what other dietary interventions might assist in recovery?
The next thing to look at is total caloric intake.
When we want to repair and rebuild after a hard workout or competition our body needs the energy to do so. If we don’t take in enough calories we are hampering our body in the recovery process because it doesn’t have the fuel it needs to start the recovery process.
If you think about it, your body’s number one priority is to keep you alive. So if you are only taking in enough energy to “keep the lights on” it is not going to use any of that energy to repair or recover from a hard workout or competition.
Now this doesn’t mean that you should be throwing caution to the wind and eating anything and everything in sight (which is quite common in this scenario). Instead you just want to focus on eating quality whole foods that will be high in bio-available macro and micro nutrients that are easy for the body to utilize. As long as you are eating whole foods you can let your hunger guide how much you eat. You really want to at least consume maintenance calories or be in a slight surplus, but you will probably be fine if you let your hunger guide you.
The final consideration from a dietary perspective to consider is your omega-3 intake. Omega-3s are a type of fat that is particularly high in fish, and is why many people will supplement with fish oil.
There is some evidence that omega-3s can help in recovery, but the evidence is mixed. There are some studies that show that a higher omega-3 intake (upwards of 6g a day) might be better for recovery (Are There Benefits From the Use of Fish Oil Supplements in Athletes? A Systematic Review, 2020). At a minimum there are a host of benefits outside of just recovery from taking around 1-3g of omega-3s so I think targeting that amount of omega-3s would be a good idea.
While there may only be a few things to target from a dietary perspective to enhance recovery there is an endless list of things you should probably avoid that will hinder recovery. Anything that is going to promote inflammation is not going to be good. Since foods that produce inflammation are going to be unique to you, it is impossible for me to provide a list of what to avoid. If you know that dairy inflames you, having a bowl of ice cream is probably not the best idea. I think you get the idea.
There is one food item I want to call out that could have detrimental effects on recovery because of the many ways it could hinder your recovery and that is alcohol. Now I am not saying that having a celebratory drink post competition is going to hurt you in a meaningful way, but heavy drinking might set you back. Excessive alcohol will hinder muscle repair and growth, it will raise cortisol and lower testosterone (breaking down muscle), and will destroy your sleep (Lakićević, n.d.).
Move Your Body: Sitting On The Couch Is No Good
The day after my half marathon my legs were quite sore and I was quite fatigued. What I really wanted to do was spend the day on the couch with my feet up. However, that was not what I did. Instead I did a few things that involve moving my body in order to help me recover quicker.
The first thing I did when I got up was foam rolled my legs.
Now there is not a ton of evidence that foam rolling will improve your recovery from a hard workout or competition (Gillis, n.d.), however I am a big believer that if something “feels good” it can’t hurt in at least mentally assisting in recovery (the placebo effect is a real thing). For me, foam rolling always feels good when my muscles are sore so I started with that.
The next thing I did after a few minutes of foam rolling was hop on the Rogue Echo Bike and did some very easy pedaling for about 20 minutes.
Why would I do this when I was clearly fatigued?
There is a lot of good evidence that easy movement can assist in recovery (Effect of Active Recovery Protocols on the Management of Symptoms Related to Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage: A Systematic Review | Request PDF, n.d.).
What modality you choose is really up to you, the key is that it needs to be EASY. It could be a run, an uphill walk, ruck, swim, cycle, row, whatever….just go WAY easier than you think you need to.
The other movement modality that people will often turn to after a hard workout or competition is stretching. I recently wrote about the use cases for stretching if you want to dive into where stretching is most useful. In that blog post I cited evidence that stretching was not useful for recovery (The Effectiveness of Post-Exercise Stretching in Short-Term and Delayed Recovery of Strength, Range of Motion and Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials, n.d.). But just like foam rolling might be useful in recovery I did it because it felt good. So if stretching feels good for you, it won’t hinder the recovery process AS LONG AS IT IS NOT INTENSE!
Passive Recovery Strategies: What Works?
In the last section I made the case for doing some kind of active recovery in order to facilitate your recovery as opposed to sitting on the couch all day. However there are some passive recovery modalities you can use to facilitate recovery from a hard workout or competition.
The reason why I cover these last is because they pale in comparison when compared to the ones above. Oddly enough many of these interventions are the ones that get the most attention because they are much sexier (and cost more money) than saying just get a good night’s sleep. Don’t be fooled, doing everything else we talked about at this point will make a greater impact than all these passive modalities combined.
The first, and hottest one we will talk about is cold exposure (see what I did there?). This modality has been used for ages by athletes…I think we have all seen pictures of the professional athlete soaking in a tub full of ice after a hard game.
Cold therapy has blown up recently with videos and pictures of everyone sitting in barrels of ice or multi-thousand dollar tubs or advocating the impact of cold showers. Besides the attention these pictures and videos garner, there is some effectiveness for recovery in getting your body cold after a hard workout or competition (Effects of Cold Water Immersion After Exercise on Fatigue Recovery and Exercise Performance–Meta Analysis, 2023). If you want to read more about the real life impacts of cold exposure you can read this blog post I wrote on the topic.
If you are looking to apply cold water immersion for recovery most of the research shows that you need to be sitting IN WATER of around 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit or 10-15 degrees Celsius for around 10-15 minutes. Note: that this does not mean taking a cold shower will have the same effect. There is not much research on using cold showers as a form of cold exposure because it is hard to control for.
Next let’s talk about the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of temperature, what about heat exposure for recovery from a hard workout or competition?
The evidence is mixed. For example there was a study that showed swimmers performed worse after using a sauna (Meyer, 2019) while there is another study that shows that exercisers had reduced muscle soreness when adding a sauna session after training (A Post-Exercise Infrared Sauna Session Improves Recovery of Neuromuscular Performance and Muscle Soreness After Resistance Exercise Training, n.d.).
So is sauna effective for recovery? I would say you should try and see how it feels for you. Kind of like foam rolling, it might feel good to sit in a sauna and get a good sweat. It will improve blood flow and if you use something like an infrared sauna that might have a positive effect by heating up the muscles.
A word of caution for both cold and hot therapy, if overdone these can be stressors and too much stress will hinder recovery so don’t overdo it If you don’t regularly use temperature exposure a little will go a long way.
Next on our list of passive modalities is red light therapy. If you are not familiar with red light therapy you basically expose your body to a specific wavelength of light (which we view as red) and this wavelength can facilitate the repair of damaged muscle (Effect of Phototherapy (Low-Level Laser Therapy and Light-Emitting Diode Therapy) on Exercise Performance and Markers of Exercise Recovery: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis, n.d.). Depending on the panel you use will determine the protocol to use to help with recovery so check with the manufacturer or the facility you are going to in order to determine the protocol.
What Is the Optimal Recovery Protocol?
Just like there isn’t the optimal diet, there is not the optimal recovery protocol either.
While each method discussed has its merits, the most effective recovery plan combines multiple strategies tailored to your individual needs and preferences.
Key Takeaways
Prioritize Sleep: Quality sleep remains the cornerstone of any recovery strategy, providing the necessary hormonal balance and muscle repair processes.
Optimize Nutrition: Focus on adequate protein intake, maintain proper caloric balance, and consider omega-3 supplementation to support recovery.
Keep Moving: Engage in light, easy movement to promote blood flow and reduce muscle soreness, but avoid intense exercise during recovery.
Explore Passive Modalities: Consider cold water immersion, heat therapy, or red light therapy as complementary recovery tools, but use them judiciously.
Remember, recovery is a highly individualized process. What works best for one person may not be as effective for another. Listen to your body, experiment with different strategies, and find the combination that helps you feel refreshed and ready for your next challenge.
Ultimately, the goal is to strike a balance between pushing your limits and allowing your body to recover and adapt. By implementing these evidence-based recovery strategies, you’ll be better equipped to handle the physical demands of your training or competitions while minimizing the risk of overtraining and injury.
As you continue your fitness journey, keep in mind that proper recovery is not just about bouncing back from a single intense session – it’s an ongoing process that contributes to your long-term health, performance, and enjoyment of physical activity. Embrace recovery as an essential part of your training regimen, and you’ll likely find yourself stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for whatever challenges lie ahead.
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References
Are There Benefits from the Use of Fish Oil Supplements in Athletes? A Systematic Review. (2020, September 1). PubMed. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32383739/
The Effectiveness of Post-exercise Stretching in Short-Term and Delayed Recovery of Strength, Range of Motion and Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. (n.d.). PubMed. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34025459/
Effect of Active Recovery Protocols on the Management of Symptoms Related to Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage: A Systematic Review | Request PDF. (n.d.). ResearchGate. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352709514_Effect_of_Active_Recovery_Protocols_on_the_Management_of_Symptoms_Related_to_Exercise-Induced_Muscle_Damage_A_Systematic_Review
Effect of phototherapy (low-level laser therapy and light-emitting diode therapy) on exercise performance and markers of exercise recovery: a systematic review with meta-analysis. (n.d.). PubMed. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24249354/
Effects of cold water immersion after exercise on fatigue recovery and exercise performance–meta analysis. (2023, January 20). PubMed Central. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9896520/
Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Acute Skeletal Muscle Recovery after Exercise. (n.d.). PubMed. Retrieved October 21, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31469710/
Gillis, J. (n.d.). Influence of Foam Rolling on Recovery From Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage. PubMed. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28902111/
Kindermann, W. (n.d.). Blood hormones as markers of training stress and overtraining. PubMed. Retrieved October 21, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8584849/
Lakićević, N. (n.d.). The Effects of Alcohol Consumption on Recovery Following Resistance Exercise: A Systematic Review. MDPI. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5142/4/3/41
Meyer, T. (2019, December 22). Effects of Postexercise Sauna Bathing on Recovery of Swim Performance. PubMed. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31869820/
A post-exercise infrared sauna session improves recovery of neuromuscular performance and muscle soreness after resistance exercise training. (n.d.). A post-exercise infrared sauna session improves recovery of neuromuscular performance and muscle soreness after resistance exercise training. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10286597/