Recovery: Earn It!

Before I go on a week-long rampage about the intensity of my training, let's get one thing straight: IF I DO NOT P.R. (a.k.a. break a personal record at least 2x/week), THEN MY TRAINING IS GOING NOWHERE. The first thing I look to is my recovery protocol to correct this situation.

Recovery is made possible by food, sleep, and stretching.

Proper restorative measures make a huge difference in how fast you can attain your objectives by:

• enhancing the amount of progress made between each session
• greatly reducing the risk of injuries
• allowing you to train more intensely, more often, with more regularity

OK, just one rampage (I promise): The people that worry the most about recovery and overtraining are the ones that don't train hard enough and aren't strong enough to need to worry about it – while the athletes that train like maniacs on a regular basis don't give recovery the respect it warrants and often push themselves beyond their limits.

That's why I, at first, hesitated to discuss the topic of recovery: the wrong people pay attention.

When I first started training I was so anxious to get "bigger, faster, stronger" that I trained almost every day with marathon workouts that would have definitely qualified as "overtraining". Take a guess what happened?

Absolutely nothing.

I actually got a bit "bigger, faster, stronger" and it taught me the true meaning of hard work (or so I thought back then). At that point in my life, I was neither strong enough nor did I push myself hard enough to overtrain.

Let me say this: You must first train hard enough for any of this recovery information to matter for you.

#1 FOOD
Proper nutrition is the best tool to aid in the recovery process. Making poor food choices will result in fatigue, muscle and joint soreness, and injuries. Just because you spend a lot of money doesn't mean you are going to get a lot of return in your restoration budget. Try to do a basic cost to benefit analysis of your training, your lifestyle, and your needs. Do not waste money on expensive supplementation if you can not even follow the nutritional basics. Keep your nutritional plan simple: fish, egg whites, vegetables, berries, apples, grapefruits, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, raw almonds, etc.

In commercial gyms there is this crazy obsession with weightloss ABOVE health and strength. Stop obsessing about the way you look. NOTHING is more appealing than a beautiful squat, dead lift, pull-up, lunge, etc. Eat to be healthy and get stronger. End of story. If you want the results, eat to reach your goal(s). Stop whining. 

 

#2 SLEEP
This is pretty straight forward: Get eight (8) hours per day. No excuses. Get enough sleep. Just do it.

#3 STRETCHING
Here I go again: Go hire a massage therapist and a trainer. There are so many types of stretching to improve ROM (range of motion) and allow the body to move better and the muscles to recover. If words such as "proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation", "agonists and antagonists", and "myofascial release" are not in your vocabulary, you have no idea what you are doing. Go hire someone who does.