How to Properly Recover After A Workout: For Muscle Growth

If you haven’t heard it before, you have now. Rest and recovery is just as important as the workout itself.

The reason being, your muscle develop and grow during rest and recovery. When you are working out, you are actually breaking down your muscles. This is why after an intense workout, your muscles feel fatigued and tired. So, if you want to see real fitness gains, learn these tips and tricks to properly recover after a workout to start seeing results now.

Let me just start by saying that over working your muscles will halt your progress. Many people start to feel frustrated about putting all this effort and energy into working out twice a day for hours on end just to see no results. When actually, all you are doing is over-working your muscles and not giving them a chance to grow stronger.

Unfortunately, this can be the case for many people when they want to see results.

So, before we get into the steps to take to properly recover after a workout, let’s take a look at what happens to your muscles during a workout and why rest and recovery is just as important as the workout itself.

Muscle Breakdown During Exercise

Muscles make up some of the most essential tissues in the body. With over 600 different muscle in the body, they help you perform your daily activities from walking and jogging to assisting with digestion and breathing.

Exercise continues to play an important role in developing and maintaining muscle within your body.

Resistant Training

In order to change your muscles, they have to be stretched and worked through resistant training. Whether you are running, performing body weight exercises, lifting weights or anything other activity, you are adding resistance. When your muscles are working harder than they normally do in your regular routine, your muscles go through a process called muscle hypertrophy.

Muscle hypertrophy is the increase and growth of muscle cells which ultimately builds muscle. However, when this greater than normal resistance is placed on the muscles, small microtears occur to the muscle. Although this is completely normal, when the muscles are worked too much bigger tears can result in injury to the muscle.

Finding the right balance of pushing your muscle into hypertrophy without over working them and causing bigger tears is key to muscle grow and progress. If the tears get too big, the body fails to fully recover and your progress is halted.

Muscle Growth During Recovery

As we just discussed, resistant exercise causes micro-tears to the muscle cells. Your body then works to rebuild and repair these tears.

Your body repairs this tears by filling the gaps between the tears with new muscle tissue and building back the fiber. This results in bigger and stronger muscles. However, new muscle tissue only forms during periods of rest.

If the body doesn’t get the adequate amount of rest, it will not properly repair the muscle cells and you will not properly recover after a workout.

This brings us back to the idea that rest and recovery is just as important as the workout itself and proper recover after a workout is essential for muscle building and results.

Proper Recovery Techniques

1. Stretch After Each Workout

Spend about 5-10 minutes after each workout stretching out those muscle, paying specific attention to the muscles that were focused on during the workout.

Stretching after each workout is a great recover habit to get into. When you stretch, you remove a lot of the built up tightness resulting in short muscles. Stretching will help keep your muscles and joints flexible and healthy. Lack of stretching causes inability to perform certain exercise and use full range in motion with movement.

Skipping stretching also puts you at risk for joint pain, muscle sprains and strains, and other injuries.

2. Proper nutrition and protein intake

Nutrition is a big part of proper recovery.

Ever heard the phrase, “you can’t out train a bad diet”.

Well…it’s true.

You need to fuel your muscle and consume high amounts of protein in order for them to grow and repair. Protein is critical for growth and development and carbohydrates will help regain energy lost during the workout.

There is one type of protein that is the best for growth and development. That is your branch chain amino acids (BCAA). They are a key ingredient in many protein shakes and drinks. These amino acids are prime muscle builders because they go directly to the skeletal muscle. These essential nutrients are found in meat, dairy and legumes.

When exercising, it is important to also be aware of the recommended dietary intake (RDI) for all the macronutrients to make sure that your muscles and body are getting the nutrients it needs to recover.

Daily Recommended Dietary Intake (RDI):

Protein: 0.8-1.5grams/kilograms of body weight (depending on physical activity, the more activity, the more protein required)

Carbohydrates: 3-10grams/kilograms of body weight (depending on physical activity and intensity)

Fats: 1.0gram/kilogram of body weight

**These are only estimates and may not to be the best option for you and your goals as an individual. If you are interesting in learning how to calculate your own nutritional needs specific to you, check out Nutrition Needs for Women: How to Calculate Your Macronutrients.

3. Stay hydrated and drink water

Drinking water goes without saying. The health benefits of adequate water intake are endless. In addition, when you are working out and sweating, your body is losing a lot of water and hydration. After a workout, it is important to drink water to rehydrate yourself and replenish the water that was lost.

The best way to make sure you stay hydrated after working out it to bring a water bottle and make sure you finish it soon after your workout is finished.

4. Allow 36-48 hours of rest between each muscle group

This one is big one. Allowing at least 36 hours of rest in between workouts will give your body adequate enough time to recover and rebuild those micro-tears.

However, may people do not wish to take off that many days per week. In order to still give your muscle times to recover and workout consecutive days in row, create a workout split.

Workout splits is how you divide your workout throughout the week. Typically, you would divide your workouts into different days for different parts of the body. For example, one day would be glutes and hamstring focused, the next day would be back and bicep focused, an additional day would be quad focused and another day would be shoulder and arm focuses. The important part to note is that you aren’t focusing on one area of the body two days in a row.

You do this to avoid over training a muscle group and allowing your body the proper time to recover. There are a TON of different workout splits out there. Finding one that works best you is important.

5. Take rest days

Rest days helps your body maintain good health and allows your body more time to recover when the continuous stress you put on it during workout. They also help avoid burnout.

In reality, working out all 7 days a week doesn’t leave time for adequate muscle recovery and isn’t very sustainable in the long run. Taking rest days helps you maintain your workout regime. stay on track to reach your fitness goals, and properly recover after a workout.

6. Foam Roll

Foam rolling will help to stretch out those muscle and avoid any tightness and tension for the workout. This will help to alleviate any pain and soreness also associated with working out.

7. Therapy methods

Most of what I have mentioned so far you can do at home. However, there are some amazing therapeutical methods out there that offer amazing muscle recover.

Some include:

8. Use a Sauna

According to the Harvard Medical School, your oxygen flow nearly doubles when you are in a sauna which helps the muscles become more relaxed and recover faster.

Spending 10-15 minutes in a sauna after your workout can drastically help your muscles recover post-workout.

A sauna also provides a bunch of other benefits including, detoxication, improves skin health, increases cardiometabolic health, increases circulation, acts as anti-inflammatory and boosts immune system.

If you are interested in becoming a sauna-user, be sure to check my article, How to Use a Sauna: FAQs, Health Benefits, Etiquette and More

Your Recovery Matters

At the end of the day, it is your health and recovery that matters. In order to get the most out of your workouts and exercise, it is important to start incorporating these tips and tricks to properly recover after a workout.

References:

University Hospitals: The Science of Health: Micro-Tears

Cleveland Clinic: Orthopaedic & Rheumatologic Institute: Health Body Muscles

Dean Chiropractic, Dr. Christophe Dean: What Causes Muscle Soreness After Working Out

How to Properly Recover After A Workout: For Muscle Growth