Your body goes through a lot under strenuous exercise—it deserves a break after all that you put it through. Many people don’t realize that the soreness they experience post-workout stems from microtrauma in the damaged muscle tissue. Tiny little tears, known as fissures, result due to repetitive contractions and extensions mid-exercise. Here are some ways to recover and relax after a difficult workout.
Your body tries to repair the damage as quickly as possible and muscles soon adapt to prevent the same injury from occurring in the future—which is how you get stronger over time. In order to heal the tissue, you send extra blood flow to the damaged cells that deliver critical nutrients for muscle repair, but this response leads to inflammation that’s painful to the touch.
Additionally, without the proper exercise cooldown, your loose, elongated muscles can recoil into a short, contracted state, leading to the stiff tightness you may experience in the days that follow. This can then lead to injuries—such as a pulled muscle or torn hamstring—the next time you go to workout.
This might sound like a lot of exercise physiology, but all of it is to stress the critical importance of muscle recovery and relaxation after a difficult workout is essential to avoiding injury and maximizing the results of your training. If you’re not sure about the proper practices or techniques, keep reading. Today’s post explores XX ways you can (and should!) give your body to recover and relax after a difficult workout as it needs to feel at its best and look at its finest.
- Always Do a Post-Workout Cooldown
As mentioned, it’s critical to help your body “cool down” after working out rather than allowing it to immediately turn off while the engine’s still hot, so to speak. That’s why you should gradually taper off each exercise in terms of intensity by lightening up the weight of each set, decreasing the number of repetitions, or slowing down the movement of each action.
In addition to allowing your heart rate to fall naturally, always be sure to stretch at the end (and at the beginning!) of every session. This is extremely important to ward off next-day muscle tightness that can lead to painful injuries.
2. Peform Active Recovery Days
Whereas stretching is considered “static” recovery, active recovery involves low impact exercise to get the blood flowing without exerting too much additional work; some great examples include yoga, swimming, and a light bicycle ride. It’s important to circulate blood to remove waste like lactic acid, a byproduct that forms after muscles burn calories. Rich doses of red blood cells also deliver essential nutrients such as oxygen and potassium that aid in cellular rejuvenation.
3. Take Supplements That Support Cellular Repair
To accelerate healing, you can take nutritional supplements designed for exercise recovery. CBD for athletes, for example, offers an all-natural way to promote healing from within due to its anti-inflammatory properties and is much safer than over-the-counter pain pills. You can find great anti-inflammatory properties also in luteolin supplements. Magnesium is another great supplement for athletes because the mineral has muscle-relaxing qualities that help alleviate the symptoms of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
4. Methods to Reduce Inflammation
When muscles are feeling tender to the touch, it’s likely due to your body’s inflammatory response. In addition to taking anti-inflammatory supplements, you can manually address the painful swelling in a number of ways:
- Ice baths – They’re not comfortable by any means, but they’re highly effective at reducing swelling while also numbing the inflamed pain.
- Cryotherapy – This strategy follows the same train of thought behind ice baths and cold packs, but cryotherapy involves briefly exposing your entire body to extremely cold temperatures for a few moments to achieve more effective results.This is why cold therapy machines are very useful. Check Ortho Braching for better understanding.
- Red light therapy – To reduce recovery time, you can enhance the body’s mitochondrial functioning with red light therapy that exposes the skin to specific wavelengths in order to create a biochemical effect.
- Compression socks – Many athletes wear compression socks before and after working out to improve blood flow and lymphatic drainage for a quicker recovery.
5. Sleep for Accelerated Healing
Finally, it’s important to understand the critical need for sleep when your body is trying to repair itself. It works hard overnight to regenerate damaged tissue, including the tears in your muscles, so make it a point to get enough rest every night.
If you tend to have trouble falling asleep, aromatherapy and guided meditations can be very helpful. They relax your mind so you can rest your body and get back to feeling at your best, both mentally and physically.
