The best athletes push the pace as hard as possible as often as possible to improve as quickly as possible. This intense drive to win often leads many to a state of overtraining. This is an athlete’s worst nightmare, forcing them to rest in the middle of a season and more prone to injury. Overtraining is not only dangerous, but also unhealthy, causing numerous symptoms such as lethargy, chronic joint pain, insomnia, depression, and loss of mental focus. The best athletes walk the fine line between training as much as humanly possible and overtraining. If you can improve your recovery between each training session, you will be fresher for the next round and you will be able to train much more intensely. After intense workouts, your body needs some time to recover enough to be able to train again. In conditioned athletes, this time is much faster than that of couch potatoes. However, if you recover faster, you’ll be more prepared to train earlier, allowing you to do more sessions throughout the week.
One of the first steps you can take to improve your athletic recovery is to incorporate rest/recovery time into your physical training program. This means planning your training routine with days off when you will rest and not train. It’s also smart to vary your program to work on different movements, tempos and volumes to keep your body and mind fresh with new stimuli and avoid becoming stale due to boring routines. Include prehab and/or recovery days in your schedule where you actively resolve pain with light exercise, movement, or stretching. During training and competition, use as many physical modalities and therapeutic activities between workouts as possible to get the most benefit and feel your best. This includes contrast baths, ice baths, massage, chiropractic and physical therapy modalities. Getting enough sleep is crucial for a full recovery. For most athletes, 7-10 hours a night is adequate, but quality sleep is essential.
Good nutrition is also a key element in athletic recovery. When the body breaks down from intense exercise, it needs plenty of water and nutrients for the building blocks to rebuild. If your nutrition isn’t good, after resting, it’s one of the first places to look if you’re slow to recover or want to speed things up a bit. While this seems a bit obvious, the fact that it comes to nutrition is an area that many competitive athletes neglect, neglect, or simply don’t know about. If you want to beat your opponents by training harder and recovering faster, pay close attention to your nutrition program. Since this article is not specifically about nutrition, here are some guidelines to help. Eat at least 1-2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass to maintain and fuel your muscles so they have the correct amino acids to rebuild and heal post-workout. Choose clean sources of carbohydrates like brown rice, yams/sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and vegetables for your energy supply. Eat lots of vegetables and some (less) fruit to get the fiber and vitamin/mineral benefits at every possible meal. Drink at least 164 ounces of clean water every day and avoid soda like the plague. Stay away from fast food, restaurant food, and try to never eat processed sugar. Finally, add essential fat sources like seeds, nuts, and avocados every day and your joints and muscles will function better and heal much faster.
If you need help on how much, when and how to put together a good nutrition program, get help from a sports nutritionist; however, avoid general specialists if they are inexperienced with athletics. Once you have good eating habits in place, you can add supplements to the mix for even more recovery potential. A good multivitamin/mineral and essential fat/fish oil supplement as a base is an excellent start to replace what is missing from your diet. Including alkaline water in your diet will help reduce acid buildup in the body. Less acid means less muscle soreness and faster recovery from training. There have been many developments in the sports drink industry recently with new products specifically for recovery periods. Drinks with certain key electrolytes, amino acids, and fast-absorbing vitamins known to help the body recover are great additions to your supplement plan. It’s also smart to take a nighttime formula. Supplements with similar recovery properties intended to be taken just before bed provide the body with healing nutrients during its most restful state.
Another very easy to use and useful tool to improve athletic recovery is specialized clothing. Compression gear seems like the new fashion, yet athletes have been training and resting in it for many years. The light pressure exerted on the skin by compression shorts, t-shirts and tights stimulates blood flow to the muscles and joints. Compression clothing also provides a little more fit and protection for the elbows, hips, and knees. Wearing these clothes while working out will keep you cooler and safer in the gym; Compression gear worn during recovery will help improve recovery time. You can further catapult your recovery by wearing compression clothing that has been infused with nutrients and healing compounds. Tommie Copper’s clothes, for example, are infused with copper. A company called Virus has perhaps the best, most innovative compression gear for speeding up athletic recovery. Virus Bioceramic compression clothing has been infused with natural compounds that deliver far-infrared therapy directly to the skin. These elements are known to help improve circulation, repair and regenerate overworked tissues, muscles and nerves, reduce inflammation and decrease pain. Virus has other interesting products like compression sportswear that helps you warm up and also a line that keeps you cooler.
Many athletes are also using some of the latest innovations in modalities to speed recovery. For example, cryotherapy has been used for many years by Olympic athletes and professional sports teams; however, it is now increasingly available to the general public. Cryotherapy exposes the body to extremely cold temperatures (60+ below zero!) but for very limited periods of time; three minutes is the norm. Sudden exposure causes blood from the extremities to flow toward the center, where it is reoxygenated. When you leave the cryotherapy unit, the newly oxygenated blood returns to the rest of your body as it warms. This brings a rush of nutrient-rich, less acidic blood to the muscles and joints. This therapy is energizing and relaxing at the same time and works wonders to eliminate inflammation in any of your joints. For an athlete who wants to recover faster, cryotherapy is the recipe to eliminate toxins, lactic acid and muscle pain in just a few minutes. This therapy is also excellent for the treatment of many chronic pain and inflammatory conditions of the muscles and joints, such as arthritis, gout, and fibromyalgia.
