How to Prioritize Recovery: A Key Component of an Active Lifestyle
Recovery as part of an active lifestyle. You may be someone who fully understands the power of recovery, or you may think that recovery is reserved for healing from sickness, injuries, and ailments. Whether you’re the former or the latter, or someone who just wants to do right by their body, let’s do a quick refresher of a few reasons why recovery is crucial to incorporate regularly into an active lifestyle.
For starters, when you allow your body the time to heal, you’re taking an active role in your injury prevention, minimizing risk for common injuries caused by overuse like tendonitis, strains, and stress fractures. Another reason to prioritize getting some R&R is for the higher performance levels to be expected immediately following a full recovery from activity. When you’ve returned to your baseline state following exercise, there is now an increased potential for output; a limited performance potential is caused by not allowing your metabolic responses to the physical stress experienced during exercise the time they need to be fully completed. Think about it this way - exercise drains your power output tank, and when this tank is drained there needs to be ample time for your body to respond and recharge. Furthermore, recovery helps with adaptation to physical stress in the long-term. Not only will your body perform better the next time you workout, but you will also be able to handle higher amounts of exercise and more physical demands than before. Lastly, recovery helps preserve muscle, bone, and connective tissues as you become more resistant to this physical stress. Recovery is key for allowing this process to occur because, as you perform at a higher intensity in the short term, and grow more resilient in the long term, your body naturally changes in response through an increase in strength and density of tissues.
Now what are some of the best ways to incorporate recovery into your active lifestyle?
1. Eat nutritionally dense meals and snacks.
Nutritionally dense food provides your body with the macro and micronutrients that are required for it to respond to exercise. Your body utilizes these nutrients through metabolic processes that create positive adaptations and recovery. A nutritionally dense and well balanced diet could include a mix of fruits, vegetables, whole grains (like fortified cereals and long grain brown rice), nuts and oils, and fish and lean meats. When you give your body the tools it needs, your recovery is more efficient and has a more positive effect on your long-term health and fitness.
2. Sleep a minimum of seven to nine hours per night.
We all know sleep is important, but have you ever thought about what your body is doing while you’re sleeping that makes it such a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle? It's pretty incredible what your body accomplishes while your conscious mind is at rest. Your brain performs self-cleaning, your muscles repair and rebuild, and your immune system works hard to flush out foreign bodies, waste, and by-products of the other physiological functions at play. It's crucial to get enough sleep to allow your body to adequately complete these processes and heal itself in response to activity, making this another key component in your healthy, active lifestyle.
3. Schedule rest days.
It's easy to understand that sleep is a basic necessity, like eating or drinking because our body tells us when we’re tired like it tells us when we’re hungry. It's a little harder to understand why less is truly more when it comes to scheduling activity. Scheduling daily (or more) high intensity workouts limits your body’s ability to recover itself and create the adaptations necessary to handle the load of exercise you’d like for it to. This leads to a limit in your capacity for energy expenditure and not just plateau in performance during activity, but eventual burnout as well. Allowing your body time to adapt is what gives way to restoration, performance enhancement, increase in physical fitness, and higher workout satisfaction. When you allow your body to rest from activity, you put your recovery first and ultimately your fitness.
4. Utilize active recovery methods.
Our bodies create compounds such as lactic acid, and our muscles experience micro-tears as normal, healthy results of the processes carried out by our muscles and energy systems when we’re performing exercise. These byproducts and micro-tears build up causing symptoms like muscle soreness and fatigue. Assisting your body in excreting these compounds and rebuilding muscle tissue through active recovery methods helps to expedite overall recovery and allows you to feel better, and stronger, faster. Some active recovery methods to incorporate into your fitness routine include foam rolling, massages, walking, ice baths, and saunas.
5. Talk with your healthcare team promptly about any pain or injuries you’re experiencing.
Talking to your healthcare team when an injury occurs or as soon as you notice pain is an amazing and responsible method of promoting longevity of muscle and joint health. Our bodies are strong, yet minor injuries causing what seems to be acute pain can lead to compensations that develop into chronic irregular movement patterns, or can themselves turn into a chronic pathology. Ignoring aches and pains, and forgoing timely professional advice can leave you sidelined for months instead of on the road to recovery without missing a beat. Being proactive by assessing movement patterns before injuries occur is another great way to prioritize recovery and overall health for your body.
There are many reasons to prioritize recovery, but understanding that it truly is the key component of an exercise routine of any kind is what matters most. As for how you fit it in to your schedule, start by trying just one of the above ideas over the course of a week and see how it works for you. Try to figuring out how you can incorporate a long night’s sleep by heading to bed earlier or sleeping in a little later, or switch out that second gym session for a foam-rolling and stretch session. However you choose to recover, remember that by prioritizing recovery today, you’ll allow yourself to become fitter, stronger and more resilient tomorrow.