On Recovery: Part 2
Under-Recovery and How to Recover
When I was new to fitness, exercise, and weightlifting—teens and early twenties—considerations for recovery centered around how sore I was and protein intake. That’s it. I was literally walking around for years in a body that was perpetually sore. If I was too sore, I’d be forced to take a day off, and I’d hate it.
I think about it as I write this, and I’m shaking my head, and it’s all a very facepalm-esque reflection. I now realize how under-recovered I was.
Exercise and training is one side—a very important one, obviously—of the fitness arc, but the other is recovery.
If you dip your toe, take a swim, or do a deep dive into any fitness related content, most of what you’ll find is people talking about how to work out and how to train.
I want bigger biceps, so how many reps do I need in each set of dumbbell curls to optimally stimulate growth? Then, how many sets should I do in a session? In a week? Seriously, so what is the optimal rotational angle of my wrists?
These are all factors that need ten seconds of your attention.
What needs more of your attention is how you recover from any exercise activity or training session. Recovery is where growth and adaptation occur. Movement is the stimulus for change and growth. It’s often microdamage. Recovery is where the magic happens.
Last week, we covered the time course and duration we might need to recover different physiological systems after training. This week, we’ll look at some specific modalities and methods to lean into to help expedite the recovery process.
A quick recap:
We started this recovery trajectory by looking at fatigue, which is an interruption or breakdown of homeostasis. Recovery is the return to homeostasis, as well as the return to the level of performance prior to the interruption. Since fatigue manifests in a multitude of ways—physiological and psychological—so does recovery.
Physiological recovery includes recovery to the central and autonomic nervous systems and cardio/circulatory factors, muscle, neuromuscular, and metabolic systems and pathways. Psychological recovery, though related to physiological systems, also includes mitigating stress, mental fatigue, and subjective feelings of global (mind and body) fatigue.
There are a couple of boulders—principles, really—that we can use and focus on to hasten and facilitate our post-training recovery. There are rocks and pebbles on the road, but these would be like the cherries on top. The boulders are what matter most.
Boulder 1: Nutrition and Energy
We can thumb wrestle and argue about which nudges the other over rank importance, but nutrition and sleep are what some YouTubers might call “S-Tier” recovery methods.
On my own weight loss journey, several years ago now, I drank some of the proverbial wellness Kool Aid and got into fasting a bit. Fasting, extended and intermittent, cycle in and out of the protocols du jour. I started with simple intermittent fasting/time-restricted feeding, which is just to limit your daily window into a contained and constrained period. Then, I started extending the fasting window. In a period of days.
Unless you have a clinical condition where you’re advised by your primary care physician to do an extended fast (not just one who talks about it mostly on the internet and is not working with you), I would encourage you not to undertake extended fasting. You’ll burn up muscle, downregulate your metabolism, hormones, neurotransmitters, immune system, and won’t end up necessarily any healthier on the other side of it. All of these, except the muscle, will rebound upon eating consistently again (though it’ll take some time), but there’s no need to go in that direction. And you can forget about physical performance or progression if you’re frequently doing prolonged fasts.
When I have conversations about fasting, I tell people that I have never felt worse in my life as a “healthy” person than when I was in an extended fast while simultaneously sleep-deprived. In retrospect, it’s torture and completely unnecessary, even counterproductive. Any benefits you might want to pursue through fasting can be achieved through a modest energy deficit, all without the negatives.
This is an extreme example, but the lesson remains—that nutrition and sleep are not just boulders but maybe better thought as the primary pillars of recovery.
Our bodies speak to us, but they don’t speak English or communicate with words. We need to learn the language of the body, and fatigue is part of that language. If we feel fatigue, we’re likely under recovering, so first take a look at your nutrition and sleep.
So what do we mean by “nutrition”?
First is adequate energy intake. “Adequate” means that you’re consistently eating at or near energy balance. Everyone’s energy requirements are different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all, but if we under-consume energy, not only will recovery be blunted, but we might find ourselves in “undernutrition” territory.
Undernutrition may result in weight loss and nutritional deficiencies leading to fatigue by means of “lack of energy” (a key concept of fatigue). When protein and energy intakes fail to meet individual need[s], body stores are catabolized to provide energy, leading to the depletion of body fat and muscle with consequent symptoms such as fatigue or tiredness.
Undereating is only one direction. “Excessive food consumption leading to obesity may also be a contributing factor to fatigue symptoms.”1 Often, excessive food consumption occurs through energy-dense, nutrient poor foods, like ultra-processed foods—like fast food— so we can be overly filled with energy and running on fumes with nutrients. We need both, for maintenance and definitely for recovery, which deplete the nutrients we already have and ups the requirements.
I’ve done several bulks and cuts over the last five years, and I can do the exact same workouts from week to week, and my body will respond and feel radically different solely based on energy intake. When in a surplus, it’s rare to get sore because all the raw materials are there for recovery. Around maintenance, there’s a little soreness, but it dissipates in a day. In a deficit, soreness is constant and often overlaps into subsequent workouts.
So, if you’re feeling under-recovered, do an energy audit. You may be inadvertently shorting yourself on energy and/or nutrients. You’ll also inevitably feel this at some point during a fat-loss phase, a targeted, finite period where you intentionally reduce calories and energy in order to shed some body fat. It’s not a permanent fixture, not a part of your identity. The larger your deficit, the faster and harder you’ll get to this point. You’ll find soreness lingering longer, muscles are less full or even “flat”, as bodybuilders refer to it, and exercise sessions become more difficult, stagnate, and even regress in performance over time. At this point, you, my friend, are under-recovering and need more energy, which is Illuminati for “food”.
Boulder 1, side 2: Sleep
In Matthew Walker’s book, Why We Sleep, he explains it early in a way that really illustrates—to understate it—the importance of sleep. Sleep has been conserved throughout evolution in most organisms, despite the vulnerability it places us in: we can’t gather resources, defend ourselves or our clan, eat, drink, or do anything else that is productive. If sleep weren’t essential, evolution would have selected us out of it. Maintenance, healing, and repair are so energetically demanding that it requires that just about everything else goes into dark mode. The operational systems need to divert internal resources to our brains and bodies to rest and recover.
I don’t think there’s anyone who would say that sleep is lame. It’s just about a given that it’s great and important. Still, to illustrate the potency of sleep on our health and recovery, there’s plenty of evidence to support it.
One study subjected participants of acute sleep deprivation (a single night) and compared a host of biomarkers to a control group of normal sleep. “Acute sleep deprivation reduced muscle protein synthesis by 18%... [and] A single night of total sleep deprivation is sufficient to induce anabolic resistance and a procatabolic environment.”2
Another study carried out a similar protocol on university students, but the experimental group only slept a couple hours fewer than the control group (7-8 hours); then, the researchers tested the students’ strength. “A positive association between sleep quality and muscle strength was observed in both male and female students. Moreover, men with shorter sleep duration (<6 hours) had poorer muscle strength than that of men who slept for 7-8 hours.”3
Finally, in one paper, “Sleep and Athletic Performance: Impacts on Physical Performance, Mental Performance, Injury Risk and Recovery, and Mental Health”4, authors note the following:
Sleep deprived individuals might increase their intake of unhealthy foods which ultimately will impair glycogen repletion and protein, which are critical for recovery in athletes. Additionally, impaired sleep directly affects growth hormone release and alters cortisol secretion, therefore, impacting recovery from exercise and stress. Sleep deprivation also increases proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-6 (IL-6 and C-reactive Protein (CRP) level which are pain-facilitating agents, ultimately affecting the immune system, and hinders muscle recovery and repair from damages sustained in high intensity training and leads towards an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system.
The authors also note that sleep and nutrition are “bidirectional”, that one affects the other. Despite which comes first, poor sleep usually results in poorer nutrition, and poor nutrition often results in poorer sleep, and each on its own, and especially together in concert, have the ability to facilitate and expedite recovery or interfere with it.
Boulder 2: Blood Flow
After exercise and training, especially when the DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) sets in the next day, the last thing you might be interested in doing is any physical activity, but getting the blood going even a little bit is a powerful recovery tool. One of the benefits of exercise itself gets the blood flowing, which allows it to perfuse the tissues, delivering nutrients and helping clear metabolic waste and byproducts. It’s the same with recovery.
Exercise generates muscle damage and acutely creates inflammation, which is an immune response to repair the damage. For this reason, exercise is referred to as a “hormetic stressor”—something that challenges our bodies and which results in an adaptation that makes us stronger, better, healthier, more robust. And getting the blood flowing post-exercise expedites this process
In exercise science, this is referred to as “active recovery”, which is submaximal activity, which is kind of a broad definition as just about anything can be submaximal, but a more pragmatic or actionable way to think of active recovery is to think of it as about half of your capabilities or effort, and these can be performed acutely, like right after training, as well as between regular training sessions and exercise days.
One systematic review of recovery methods on professional and collegiate athletes concluded that a simple 6-10 minutes of light activity post-training had positive outcomes on physiological and psychological recovery as well as on subsequent performance.5 The light activity could be just about anything, from walking, cycling, light jogging, and even stretching.
Regarding active recovery between regular training/exercise sessions, authors of another paper note that it “could take the form of training opposing muscle groups on back-to-back days, or could consist of light aerobic cardio sessions or low-volume power-type resistance training.”6
The important thing to consider “when choosing a modality that involves similar muscle groups or exercise patterns, the proposed mechanism of recovery enhancement should take into account an improved blood flow to the designated area. However, appropriate volume and intensity of AR [active recovery] are crucial.” That is, you want to consider how you can get the blood flowing through the affected area and not do so much that you’re delaying recovery or even adding more damage.
Boulder 1: Nutrition and Sleep
Boulder 2: Blood Flow
Then, there are a couple of rocks and pebbles we can pick up, but these boulders will likely get us 90% of the recovery we want after training.
You might have noticed that several of the papers I’ve cited are based on athletes, and you might think that what an athlete’s situation doesn’t apply to you. Maybe.
Dr. Andy Galpin is an exercise scientist and researcher, a professor, and a coach that works with elite athletes. He’s also a science communicator and has his own podcast, called Perform (a great resource). He concludes each episode with the following axiom:
“In the words of Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you are an athlete.”
Azzolino D, Arosio B, Marzetti E, Calvani R, Cesari M. Nutritional Status as a Mediator of Fatigue and Its Underlying Mechanisms in Older People. Nutrients. 2020 Feb 10;12(2):444. doi: 10.3390/nu12020444. PMID: 32050677; PMCID: PMC7071235.
Lamon S, Morabito A, Arentson-Lantz E, Knowles O, Vincent GE, Condo D, Alexander SE, Garnham A, Paddon-Jones D, Aisbett B. The effect of acute sleep deprivation on skeletal muscle protein synthesis and the hormonal environment. Physiol Rep. 2021 Jan;9(1):e14660. doi: 10.14814/phy2.14660. PMID: 33400856; PMCID: PMC7785053.
Chen Y, Cui Y, Chen S, Wu Z. Relationship between sleep and muscle strength among Chinese university students: a cross-sectional study. J Musculoskelet Neuronal Interact. 2017 Dec 1;17(4):327-333. PMID: 29199194; PMCID: PMC5749041.
Charest J, Grandner MA. Sleep and Athletic Performance: Impacts on Physical Performance, Mental Performance, Injury Risk and Recovery, and Mental Health. Sleep Med Clin. 2020 Mar;15(1):41-57. doi: 10.1016/j.jsmc.2019.11.005. PMID: 32005349; PMCID: PMC9960533.
Ortiz R, Sinclair E, Amanda J, Elder C, Dawes J. A Systematic Review on the Effectiveness of Active Recovery Interventions on Athletic Performance of Professional-, Collegiate-, and Competitive-Level Adult Athletes. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 33(8): p 2275-2287, August 2019. | DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000002589
Sousa CA, Zourdos MC, Storey AG, Helms ER. The Importance of Recovery in Resistance Training Microcycle Construction. J Hum Kinet. 2024 Apr 15; 91(Spec Issue):205-223. doi: 10.5114/jhk/186659. PMID: 38689583; PMCID: PMC11057610.