Recovery is Essential
Recovery is the most essential part of training, its where all the magic happens. The recovery period is when your body absorbs the work and rebuilds to become stronger, fitter and more powerful. Recovery is not just for professional athletes, it’s for every individual who moves their body on the regular.
Boosting your recovery games doesn’t need to be time-consuming or elaborate. I’ve broken it down into 5 areas with simple strategies to incorporate into your daily life.
1. Activate Your Rest State
Exercise is a form of stress, meaning it can either build you up or break you down. Training stress is needed to build muscle, get stronger and be more fit. If your training is not balanced with sufficient rest, the catabolic (breaking down) effects of working-out go unchecked. Understanding how to balance your stress and activating your rest state is essential.
Stress is a physiological response that leads to an increased heart rate, rapid or shallow breathing, higher blood pressure, reduced heart rate variability, redirection of blood flow away from certain organs towards your muscles, increased alertness, narrowing of your visual field and the release of hormones including cortisol and adrenaline.
Stress and all its physiological responses originate in your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Named for the numerous “automatic” or unconscious processes it regulates such as breathing, digestion, and sleep/wake cycles. It’s not entirely automatic as you can influence the ANS with your thoughts, such as eliciting a stress response from simply anticipating a future event.
The autonomic nervous system is further divided into two branches: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The Sympathetic nervous system (SNS) increases alertness whereas the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) brings about calmness and rest. You want a balance or a see-saw effect between these two systems. If your sympathetic system is constantly activated it can lead to protracted or excessive amounts of cortisol that results in suppression of sex hormones (including testosterone), infertility by inhibiting ovulation, sleep problems, digestive issues, brain fog and the loss of lean muscle and increased fat storage. All the things you don’t want.
Making sure you’re balancing your SNS and PNS throughout your day is imperative for optimal brain functioning, hormone balance and performance. It’s easy to get stuck in an alert and activated state from the moment you wake up until you try to go to bed. It takes intention and just a few minutes of your day to bring in some restful moments, and it doesn’t include naps. Unless you want it to.
Meals and bedtime are important times to prioritize a parasympathetic state as you need to be in a restful state for digestion to occur. Blood is diverted away from your digestive system when you’re in a sympathetic or alert state and if your cortisol is elevated at night, it prevents melatonin from being released, making it hard to fall asleep.
2. Nutrient Timing
When you eat matters a lot when working to maximize recovery. Exercise stimulates cortisol, cortisol is catabolic meaning it breaks down muscle. This is what we want from exercise as the rebuilding or anabolic phase that follows generates more lean muscle and stronger, more powerful muscle. The trick is to stop the catabolic process as soon as possible following exercise to get you into an anabolic or rebuilding state right away.
To do this you need protein, and you need it quickly. The current research is suggesting 20-30 grams of protein with 5-7 grams of BCAA (branch chain amino acids). If you are someone who truly tolerates dairy, whey protein will have adequate amounts of BCAA’s. You also need carbohydrates, don’t skip on carbs following your workout. It will only slow your metabolism.
In addition to stopping the catabolic response, there’s a limited window following exercise where the body is more insulin sensitive allowing you to absorb carbohydrates faster. Women have a 30-minute magic recovery window whereas men have closer to 2 hours. Despite this difference in this carbohydrate uptake window, getting the protein into your system fast will stop the catabolic phase and move you into the anabolic and rebuilding phase maximizing your recovery opportunities.
3. Eat Enough
You need to fuel your body. Our vehicles don’t run on an empty gas tank or battery, you shouldn’t expect your body to do so either. Under fueling not only deprives your muscles and brain the calories to function but it creates extra stress in the body. Active individuals routinely undereat, intentionally and unintentionally, in attempts to change their body composition or by simply not realizing they need to eat more.
This happens a lot in recreational athletes as they don’t consider themselves to be athletes or active enough. They’re just working out to stay healthy. If you go to the gym three times a week, do a bunch of yoga, or sweat it out on your peloton - you are an active person and you need to eat like one.
Undereating leads to Low Energy Availability (LEA), this is simply not eating enough to support your body’s basic life processes. It’s burning more calories (energy) than you’re taking in and it puts your body into conservation mode – metabolism slows down, fat storage goes up, thyroid function slows and heart rate drops. If this LEA state goes on long enough, the thyroid and metabolic changes can become permanent. What is long enough? Just four days in an LEA state can lead to irreversible thyroid dysfunction.
LEA is the precursor to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs), a more severe and problematic case of not fueling adequately for your body’s energy needs. In addition to the above-mentioned complications from LEA, REDs tack on higher risk for stress fractures, decreased immunity, osteoporosis, depression, and anxiety. Being under fueled triggers cortisol because it’s a stressor. Note that many women have an exaggerated cortisol spike with fasting compared to men. Prolonged periods of elevated cortisol lead to muscle breakdown, hormone imbalances and more fat storage. Undereating not only makes you tired, irritable, and unable to perform, it drives all the physiological process you’re trying to avoid.
The average person burns 1400 calories a day doing nothing. Nothing but breathing, laying around and using the bathroom. Basically, you burn that many calories just to exist. Add in major brain activity getting through your day, moving around to prep food, getting dressed and hustling to get yourself and family members to their respective daytime locations and you’re already burning way more calories. Now add a workout!
The literature has shown without question that dieting in the manner we all grew up with – eat less to lose weight, does not work, and only slows down your metabolism, sometimes permanently. You really do need to eat enough to have maximum energy, exquisite brain function, uplifted moods, and optimal performance.
Undereating is easy to do. Many individuals crank up their milage or frequency of workouts, the intensity or duration of each training session without adjusting their nutrition intake. It’s an easy thing to miss but comes with a high cost. Another way to accidentally put yourself in an LEA state is by eating less on rest days. You shouldn’t change your fueling or caloric intake on rest days, if anything, it helps you make up for any under fueling that may have happened on your hard effort days.
How much you need to eat is very specific to your body, lifestyle, genetics, and training. On average I see most active women and men requiring a minimum of 2100 calories a day, again, this is all very individualized. Experiment with different routines, prioritize protein and fuel your body appropriately.
4. Sleep
Sleep is a non-negotiable when it comes to optimal recovery. Sleep is where the deep tissue repair and regeneration occurs along with essential hormone resets and stimulation. If you’re getting less than 7 hours of sleep, you’re doing your body a disservice. Yes, there are individual differences in sleep needs, but the research agrees that seven hours is the minimum.
To truly perform well and completely recovery from training and overall stress exposure, good sleep and enough good sleep is necessary. Naps are great, especially for allowing your nervous system to move into a restful state but they do not make up for lost sleep.
Alcohol disrupts everyone’s sleep quality if not quantity also. I’m not suggesting you avoid it entirely but take a hard look at if it’s serving you. Eating late and being on screens without blue blocking glasses will also make it difficult to get into the deeper, more restful states of sleep.
5. Listen to your body, not your ego
When you’re in pursuit of exciting and inspiring goals, you’re usually pushing pretty hard. I’ve talked a lot on how to balance that drive and hard work with rest and restoration to fully recover. What has the potential to sabotage all your efforts is your ego.
Your ego can be exceptionally critical, insulting and might try to identify “failure” as a knock to your self-worth or value. Feed the good wolf, remind yourself of what’s true: you’re motivated, you work hard, the end-goal does not define you or your efforts in anyway. Focus on the process and create process goals (also called learning goals) for the journey.
When you listen to your ego, and not your body, you can push too hard and not allow yourself enough rest and recovery that you really need. It’s hard to take a day off when you planned to go hard. It’s hard to take an extra deload week when your body needs it if your training partners are ramping up. It’s hard when you’re not performing the way you think you should. There’s usually a reason for those changes and if you don’t listen to your body, you might push yourself into overtraining.
Tracking your nighttime heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) are useful tools to better understand how you’re matching your training with adequate recovery. Adding in objective data helps to quiet your ego when you’re not sure if you need more rest or a longer warmup. You don’t need wearables like the Oura Ring or Whoop band, but they can be helpful. They’re just one tool. Quiet your ego, trust your intuition and listen to what your body needs.
Learning how to optimize your recovery is essential to building resiliency and thriving in all areas of your life. Dialing in your recovery game is a superpower. Get specific with your body!
Keeping you in pursuit,
Dr. Marsha✨
PS: If you want the brief version of this, aka my “Recovery Optimization Tool Kit”, you can grab it here.