Recovery Strategies (Part 1)
While working hard during exercise is important to reap the benefits of our efforts - it’s equally important to monitor and manage your recovery. Here are a few tried and true methods to ensure you are optimising your recovery capacity and performance
Drink plenty of water, even when not feeling thirsty.
Are you getting your 8 cups each day? While it might be easy to remember, this doesn’t take into account our individual variations in diet and exercise habits. Recommended total daily fluid intake (including food and other beverages) for males is around 3.7L and females 2.7L (15.5 cups / 11.5 cups).
It’s also important to remember that when doing strenuous activity our body finds it more difficult to stay hydrated. Therefore, if you are losing fluid weight during exercise from sweating – aim to replace 125-150% of this fluid deficit over the next 2-6 hours. For example, if you lost 1 kg (1000mL), you should be getting 1.25L of fluids over the following hours after you finish your workout.
Another simple way to tell if your body needs more fluids is to check the colour of your urine, generally speaking this should be clear or just slightly straw-yellow coloured.
Get good quality sleep every night.
A multitude of health benefits can amount from ensuring you get 7-9 hours of adequate sleep. When sleep isn’t up to scratch and you aren’t following your circadian rhythm (body clock), a range of stress hormones can be thrown out of balance.
This occurs primarily due to changes in the brains release of neurotransmitters in response to different forms of light and magnetism. This is the basis behind switching off electronics at night and ‘blue-light’ control on smart devices to improve the quality of time spent asleep.
Generally, from 10pm till 2am our bodies go into physiological repair to recycle sex and stress hormones while regenerating our muscles and glands. Following this, from 2 am until 6am, a psychogenic/mental repair cycle takes places in prep for the body to restart our day with a spike in stress hormones that wakes us up as the sun rises.
This stress spike is important to ensure we are alert and oriented in the morning, however if the preceding hours of sleep are of poor quality (or quantity)- we may find ourselves accumulating fatigue from inadequate recovery.
Reduce stress
Stress hormone fluctuations are a natural part of the way our bodies function, however, poor stress management can lead to imbalance in our stress hormone levels, (we call this Allostatic Overload) which can increase the risk of adverse health effects and hamper recovery from strenuous activity over time.
Managing this is particularly important when undertaking intense physical exercise as our body will react to our emotional stress in a similar way to physical stress. This is also why some seemingly simple tasks can be difficult to handle with when fatigued.
While it’s much more easily said than done, we should still aim to do our best to limit external lifestyle stressors as best as possible particularly when we have increased physical stress from our exercise regime.
Listen to your body
The most important factor in successfully recovering from any intense training is to implement these strategies early and avoid pushing through symptoms of overtraining - or as many experts have preferred, “under-recovery”.
Make sure you allocate time and focus to the areas that need it most to form a well-rounded program. If eating and drinking correctly are known to be difficult for you – place a special emphasis on adequate nutrition and hydration when under greater physical demands.
If managing stress levels and sleep hygiene/patterns are a struggle – take extra measures to integrate relaxation techniques into your routine.
Prevention of overtraining is far better than a cure and this begins with recognising the early signs and symptoms.
Check out our Overtraining Signs & Symptoms blog for more information.