A regular workout on an intense level of exercise is the key to maintain a chiseled body and remain at the peak of physical fitness for a prolonged time. You might even spend several hours a week on your workout activities like cardio and weight lifting. All these endeavors put your glutes on fire and make you satisfied with the job done.
But this is where you begin the real work on your body and physique. What most people fail to realize is that the magic doesn’t happen during rigorous sessions, it’s the post workout where your muscles start developing. The post workout recovery period is very crucial as this is where you could either undermine all your hard work or accentuate the results with smarter lifestyle tweaks.
Unfortunately, a majority of individuals don’t have plans for post-exercise recovery. It dramatically impacts the performance of your body, producing a plateau without any results. To help you better, this article will state the significance of post workout recovery and provide the required tips to maximize such results.
Importance of Post Workout Recovery
Recovery and rest are essential parts of your regular workout regime. If you have a fitness hangover from overtraining, it can lead to exhaustion and fatigue, adversely affecting your performance. Your after-exercise recovery routine is necessary as it allows the body to train more effectively.
It’s only when you rest that your body repairs muscles and damaged tissues, ensuring a stronger physique than before. Considering the fact that a muscle requires a day or two to repair and rebuild, exercising it again leads to a breakdown instead of building.
Here are some post-workout habits, adopting which will benefit your body in aligning with the fitness goals.
Tips for Post Workout Recovery
- Stay Hydrated
What else can be better than a bottle full of water to rehydrate the body post workout? This way, you regain all the water loss during the intense exercise through sweat. Replenishing your fluid levels prevents muscle soreness, builds strengths, and enhances muscle flexibility. This optimal recovery plan also allows the body to flush metabolic waste and toxin buildup from the body.
Apart from water, you can opt for post recovery health drinks. Make your post recovery health drinks with coconut water, chocolate milk, or green tea. Most of these drinks help balance the electrolytes with vital minerals like potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium, which aids in the faster recovery of muscle.
- Grab a Healthy Snack
After your workout session, try including post workout recovery supplements paired with a snack containing protein and carbohydrates. It can be consumed within 45 minutes after completing your exercises. This helps replenish the nutrients in the muscle tissues and start the recovery and repair process.
Proteins contribute to the amino acids that help regenerate and rebuild the muscle. On the other hand, carbs restore the glycogen level that produces energy within the body. There are many quick healthy recipes like scrambled eggs and veggies, cottage cheese, grilled chicken strips, chickpeas, tofu, and several others to help you with your post workout fatigue.
- Don’t Miss Cooling Down
Finally, when you are about to finish an intense workout session, end by gradually slowing down the exercise for 5-10 minutes. It can be a jog or a light stretch out that helps get your heart pace to reach normal levels. According to the American Heart Association, cooling down is equally important, just as warming up before exercise.
Stopping too fast can result in dropping the heart rate and blood pressure, making you fall sick. A proper cooling down enhances the muscle recovery rate and prevents it from pain and injury.
- Consume Enough Protein
A post workout recovery gets better when you consume enough protein in your diet. Protein is an essential nutrient for muscle repairing and building. When you incorporate protein into your diet, there is a quick shot of amino acids to jump-start the recovery process.
Daily intake of protein can be obtained from whole foods like Greek yogurt, eggs, tofu, lean cuts of meat, etc. You can even make an amazing post workout recovery powder by having whey proteins after the workout sessions.
- Get a Massage
It’s a proven fact that post workout recovery accelerates when you massage your body after indulging in heavy exercise and workout training. It stimulates blood circulation while enabling the body to relax completely.
Further, you can also consider self-massage in the body to reduce post-exercise muscle soreness. Today, there are many tools available in the market, such as foam rollers, baseballs, and massage sticks that decrease muscle stiffness through circulation and induce a state of relaxation.
- Enjoy a Cool Shower
When you are engaging in strenuous workout sessions, you microdamage the muscle. This causes multiple issues like inflammation, swelling, and soreness. So, when you plunge into a cold shower, it reduces the inflammation and soreness after workouts.
- Indulge in Self-Care
It isn’t surprising that emotional and mental well-being is also crucial to support mental recovery. The chronic stress from busy schedules and deadlines can impair the recovery timeline. During this time, the body mainly prioritizes stress response and cannot consider muscle recovery.
You apply techniques to reduce stress through wellness activities like mindfulness and meditation. Engaging in your favorite pursuits like watching a good movie and listening to a relaxing song can also help alleviate the stress.
- Get a Proper Sleep
A lack of adequate sleep can induce factors like increased fatigue, reduced tolerance to workout, alter mood, and negatively hamper physiological mechanisms to cope with stress training. The purpose of getting a goodnight’s sleep is to speed up the rate of recovery in the body.
The hormonal secretions that happen at night impact the regeneration process. So, having a balanced sleep quota is essential to awaken with proper energy levels.
Work Well on Your Post Workout Recovery Plan!
It’s important to utilize the post workout recovery plan to gain the maximum benefits for your muscles to heal quickly. Just like your workout routine, you also need to follow a post recovery regime to boost your performance and rebuild muscles.
Now that you know its perks, its time to create your robust recovery plan by including workout supplements from Healthy Planet Canada.