It’s all about Recovery - 5 tips
How to recover from a workout?
As an active person or athlete, recovery is just as important as your workout routine. Exercising intensively or regularly breaks down muscle tissue and causes muscle soreness and overall tiredness.
If you do not have a recovery strategy, it is more likely to feel sore for longer. That will make your next workout less efficient and you are more prone to injury.
Following a recovery plan enables your body to recover quickly so that you can get back into training faster and speed up your training progress. This is why planning your recovery is just as important as planning your training routine.
What helps sore muscles recover faster
1. Re-hydrate
The first thing you want to do after every workout is to hydrate. Exercising usually comes with sweating which means losing important vitamins and minerals that you want to replace as soon as possible. Drinking a mix of water and electrolytes (we recommend BIX Recovery tablets) within 15 minutes after completing a workout will replenish lost vitamins and minerals and decrease the chance of getting sore muscles.
BIX Recovery hydration tablets are high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory components. They contain 6 x more magnesium and 8 x more vitamins & minerals than most hydration tablets, including the main electrolytes sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc as well as BCAA’s (branched-chain amino acids = protein building blogs), Bromelain, Coenzyme Q10, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Iron and B12.
2. Active Recovery
Another essential aspect to improve your recovery is active recovery. Your main goal is to look for light low impact activities such as an easy walk, an easy bike ride, swim, yoga/ stretching, or foam rolling. Any kind of light physical activity will improve circulation and thereby increase the distribution of nutrients to sore muscles which helps them recover faster.
3. Massage guns
Massage guns are getting more and more popular and are becoming the new foam rollers. They help to release lactic acid, break up knots and scar tissue in your fascia, and increase overall blood flow. Due to the percussive and vibrating vertical motion, massage guns get deeper into the muscles than a foam roller. It is a type of deep tissue massage that improves circulation - resulting in faster muscle repair, improved muscle function, and range of motion.
4. Sleeping with compression wear and heating pads
Our body’s repair mechanism is the most effective while we are asleep. Simply allowing yourself to sleep more is a great tool to help your muscles recover faster. Studies have shown that a minimum of 8 hours of sleep (even 8+ hours after an intense workout or race) helps to speed up muscle recovery, prevents injury, and improves an athlete’s performance.
If you want to support the recovery process while you are asleep, you can put a heating pad on sore spots (calves, quats, etc.). This kind of heat therapy increases the circulation to the sore area which means providing more nutrients to painful joints or muscles and flushing out toxic components.
Adding compression wear while you are asleep will help blood vessels pump more blood in the area. To get the most out of both, you could place a heating pad and compression wear over it.
5. Sauna sessions
A sauna session post-workout has been shown to improve the flow of oxygen-rich blood to oxygen-depleted muscles. Thereby muscle tears heal quicker which enables you to get back into training faster - speeding up your overall training progress. Sweating in the sauna also helps release harmful by-products through the skin that are produced during exercise.
Disclaimer: If you feel like you are getting sick, it is not a good idea to go to the sauna since the heat of the sauna is causing additional stress to the body and can weaken rather than strengthen your immune system.
In a nutshell: Athletes and active people will benefit from a recovery plan since it results in a quicker recovery between workouts - speeding up your overall training progress.
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