recovery management

Primary and secondary methods of recovery and how to prioritize them.

If you are not yet familiar with recovery and rest management, we wouldn’t even recommend you start training before being really clear about this topic.

First of all, it is very important to understand that you do not progress when you train, but when you rest and recover from your session (read article “General Adaptation Syndrome” for more in-depth explanation).

This is why planning rest and recovery should be done with at least as much care as you plan your training.

Let’s start with the primary and most effective way to recover: rest. Nothing can replace sleep and rest, not even the most sophisticated and most expensive treatments out there. If you don’t sleep and let your body rest enough, there is nothing that can make up for it and no matter how hard you try, you’ll end up endangering both your progress and your health.

How much rest is enough or how often you should train will of course depend on your current fitness level. However, it might not differ as much as you think and you will still need to rest a lot even when you reach an advanced level or don’t feel tired from your sessions.

In general, it is recommended not to train strength more than 3 times a week if you are a complete beginner and you should never train 3 days in a row.

For intermediate levels, training strength 3 or 4 times a week and adding one session dedicated to mobility and cardio work should allow you to make progress as fast as you can while also letting you get enough rest. Please make sure you don’t train strength 3 days in a row and that you don’t train the same muscle groups 2 days in a row either.

For advanced levels, a maximum of 5 sessions a week is recommended and if you plan to train strength 3 days in a row, please make sure you train different muscles every time.

Also keep in mind that simply training different muscles every day doesn’t exempt you from taking rest days. Your body will need a full rest day every 2 or 3 days to make sure it recovers properly before resuming training. Remember you progress and get stronger when you rest, not when you train, and if you keep training every day you will only keep adding stress to your body without giving it time to adapt. This will lead to what we call detraining and possibly injury (see “General Adaptation Syndrome” article).

Once you have a proper rest schedule planned, you might start looking into additional ways to improve and speed up recovery. Again, the next most effective ways to recover won’t be the most sophisticated ones. Stretching, walking and proper nutrition will be of great help and might be all you need to fully recover between your workouts.

If you still want or need to optimize your recovery process, you could try ice baths, foam rolling, massage guns, compression therapy, saunas etc… These are actually great for relaxing, and being relaxed and releasing stress definitely helps in healing and helping muscles and other parts of your body recover.

To conclude, we could say that recovery management is actually pretty simple and more straight-forward than what we tend to hear or read from marketing messages. Sleep first, don’t train too often, and then only you can explore other forms of recovery and see what works or doesn’t work for you.

If you really take time off and get your full hours of sleep, you will find that additional recovery methods actually make little to no difference for the non-professional athlete.