Recovery
Rest and recovery can so often be overlooked in our pursuit of health and fitness gains. After all, it’s not exactly interesting is it? No coach or influencers do videos on how well they rested and recovered yesterday do they?
Most of them just show the fun stuff, how much they can deadlift, snatch, clean and jerk but recovery is so important for health, wellness and for most importantly for a lot of us, muscle growth and repair!
Put simply, rest and recovery is the return to a normal state of mind and body. No fatigue and clear mental focus. And for athletes or those of us training, recovery can also be defined as the time between training or competing that allows us to meet or exceed previous performance.
Now, if, like us you find it difficult not training or see a day of not training as unproductive, why not replace your regular training time with some ‘active recovery’? A short walk, a low heart rate zone spin on your bike to open your legs up, a stretch and flexibility session in front of Netflix? Not training doesn’t have to mean doing nothing, doing these things is actually even more beneficial and will catapult you further along your health and fitness journey.
The easiest way to make sure you’re getting enough rest and recovery is to look at your training split first. If you’re training 5 - 6 times a week, the ideal scenario would be to have a full ‘rest day’ on the day you don’t train whilst making sure you’re stretching regularly during your training days also. Perhaps, if you usually training in the mornings, you stretch well in the evenings. If you’re training 3 - 4 times a week, rather than simply grouping your training together, for example training Monday - Thursday with the weekend off. Make sure you have days in between that you use for your recovery, this will give your body the optimum training split and recovery period long term.
There’s also much debate about ‘overtraining’ with many people believing it’s either not a thing or overhyped but there are many ways to see if you could fall into this category:
🦾 Muscle soreness and weakness
🦾 Decreased exercise performance with routines you perform regularly (unable to hit times, weights, goals)
🦾 Decreased appetite
🦾 Decreased quality and quantity of sleep
🦾 GI upset
🦾 Apathy towards training
🦾 Decreased motivation and focus generally
If you find yourself with any of these it may well be that you’re overreaching and it’s time to focus more on your recovery.
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