Rest & Recovery
Rest is key and is arguable the most important part of training. It is often overlooked but optimising your recover massively benefits the outcome of your training.
Training places stress on the body, it breaks us down and tears micro fibres in muscles. It’s the rest that rebuilds us and makes us stronger than we were before. The rest give our body’s time to adapt to the training we are doing, if we don’t get adequate rest we would become weaker and weaker eventually injuring ourself and compromising all our hard work. That being said rest needs to be earned, we need to cause enough stress on the body for adaptation to occur. There are a few things we can do to help our body’s recover faster and more efficiently, it doesn’t have to be to complex or expensive, sports massage and foam rollers are great but it’s important to start with the most efficient things.
Nutrition and diet are key, remember food is everything. Not only is it fuel and provides us energy it provides the nutrients needed to rebuild and recover. Protein is a big one, it helps maintain muscle mass and promotes muscle growth. A good principal to follow is getting between 0.8g to 1.6g of protein per kilo of body weight. Protein isn’t the only thing that can benefit recovery when it comes to nutrition, it’s important to get a good balanced diet to provide the body with enough nutrients to enhance recovery. Micronutrients like vitamin B12, vitamin D, magnesium, zinc and many others are important for recovery.
Making sure we stay hydrated is also super important, our body’s are 75% water and keeping soft tissue hydrated is great for recovery and injury prevention. Each day aim to drink 1 litre per 20kg of body weight in order to stay properly hydrated.
The next one is sleep, getting your 8 hours is crucial. Our body’s recover faster during sleep. Getting to bed the same time ever night and walking up the same time each day isn’t just great for recovery but it’s a good habit that can help in all sorted of aspects of life.
Active recovery is an interesting one, rest doesn’t mean sitting on the sofa all day taking naps. When you are feeling sore and tired the last thing you want to do is active recovery but it is something that can have a massive impact. The goal is to increase blood circulation, this will remove waste products from soft tissue while also providing fresh blood flow that delivers important nutrients, helping repair and rebuild muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Low impact aerobic exercises that aren’t to strenuous are great for active recovery, things like walking, yoga, swimming or mobility exercises are best. These along with static stretching after any training session all have massive benefits to recovery.
There are many other factors that can help with recovery, massages, foam rolling and theraguns are all super helpful tools but it’s important to focus on the essential. How is your diet? Are you getting enough sleep? Do you have a smart training plan that has rest in place? Focus on nailing these and watch your recovery improvement. Remember the faster our body’s recovery the more we can train the stronger we can become and faster we can achieve our goals.