The best athletes pick up the pace as hard as possible as often as possible to improve as quickly as possible. This intense drive to win often drives many into a state of overtraining. This is an athlete’s worst nightmare, forcing them to take time off 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 travel 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 will be able to train much more intensely. After intense workouts, your body needs a certain amount of time to recover enough to be able to train again. In conditioned athletes, this time is much faster than those addicted to television. However, if you recover faster, you will be more prepared to train earlier, allowing you to do more sessions during the week.
One of the first steps you should 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 where you will be resting and not training. It’s also smart to vary your program to work on different movements, tempos, and volume to keep your mind and body fresh with new stimuli and avoid becoming obsolete from boring routines. Include pre-rehabilitation and / or recovery days in your program where you actively resolve pain with light exercise, movement, or stretching. Both during training and competition, use as many physical modalities and therapeutic activities between workouts as possible to get the most benefit and feel better. This includes contrast bath, ice, massage, chiropractic, and physical therapy modalities. Getting enough sleep is essential for a full recovery. For most athletes, 7-10 hours / night is adequate, but quality sleep is essential.
Good nutrition is also a key element in athletic recovery. When the body breaks down from strenuous exercise, it needs a lot of water and nutrients for the building blocks to rebuild. If your nutrition is poor, after resting is one of the first places to look if you are slow to recover or want to improve things a bit. While this seems a bit obvious, the fact that it comes down to nutrition is an area that many competitive athletes neglect, neglect, or simply don’t know about at all. 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 / pound of lean body mass to maintain and fuel your muscles so they have the right amino acids to rebuild and heal after training. Choose clean carbohydrate sources such as brown rice, yams / sweet potatoes, oats, and legumes for your energy supply. Eat lots of vegetables and some (less) fruits for fiber and vitamin / mineral benefits in all possible meals. Drink at least 164 ounces of clean water every day and avoid sodas like the plague. Stay away from fast food, restaurant food, and strive 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 the help of a sports nutritionist; however, avoid general specialists if they are inexperienced with athletics. Once you have good eating habits, you can add supplements to the mix for even greater recovery potential. A good multivitamin / mineral and essential fat / fish oil supplement is an excellent start to replace what is missing from your food. Including alkaline water in your diet will help reduce acid build-up in the body. Less acid means less muscle soreness and faster recovery from training. Recently, there have been many developments in the sports drink industry 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 recuperative properties that should be taken just before bed provide the body with healing nutrients during its most relaxing state.
Another useful and very easy-to-use tool to improve athletic recovery is specialized clothing. Compression gear seems like the new fad, yet athletes have been exercising and resting in it for many years. The light pressure on the skin of compression shorts, t-shirts and leggings stimulates blood flow to the muscles and joints. Compression clothing also provides some additional tension and protection for the elbows, hips, and knees. Wearing these clothes while exercising will keep you cooler and safer in the gym; The compression equipment used 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 clothing, for example, is impregnated with copper. A company called Virus has perhaps the most innovative and best compression equipment to accelerate athletic recovery. Virus Bioceramic compression clothing has been infused with natural compounds that emit far infrared therapy directly onto 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 dangerously extremely cold temperatures (minus 60+!) But for very limited periods of time; three minutes is the norm. Sudden exposure causes the blood in the extremities to rush to the center, where it is re-oxygenated. When you leave the cryotherapy unit, the freshly oxygenated blood is returned to the rest of the body as it warms up. This brings a rush of nutrient-rich, less acidic blood to your 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, cryo therapy is the recipe to eliminate toxins, lactic acid and muscle pain in just a few minutes. This therapy is also excellent for treating many chronic pain and inflammatory conditions of the muscles and joints, such as arthritis, gout, and fibromyalgia.