Rest and recovery are crucial for maximizing gains from your workout, and regularly incorporating them into your fitness regime will not only help you reach your fitness goals, but also maximise your body’s ability to recovery. However, not all rest and recovery activities are equal.
So, what is the best way to spend your rest days to maximise your recovery?
Active recovery workouts are designed to help aid recovery by priming your body’s metabolic pathways of recovery; thus, allowing your body recover faster both physically and psychologically. Generally, this involves less intense and less volume than your standard workouts, approximately 40-60% of your maximum heart rate. The goal of active recovery is to feel energized and allow your body to properly recover from intense training.
Here are a few suggestions for your next rest day:
Get Moving
Low intensity aerobic exercises such as walking, swimming, and cycling are excellent activities to undertake on your days off. These exercises can help increase blood flow and reduce stiffness. A 30-minute swim, ride or walk at a slower pace can significantly help cut recovery time as well as help you stay on top of your nutrition on your rest days.
Stretching
Stretching is extremely beneficial and can help maximise your gains outside the gym. By incorporating active recovery into your fitness regime, you will be able to recover faster and therefore train harder. By improving your flexibility and joint mobility, it significantly reduces your risk of injury as well as allow you to better perform movements in the gym. In addition to stretching, foam rolling is an excellent way to maximise your recovery on your rest days. Rolling each major muscle group significantly helps to reduce muscle stiffness and increase your range of motion.
Yoga
Yoga is an excellent exercise to include on rest days in order to maximise recovery, but it can also be incorporated daily as a form of recovery. Yoga helps your body recover from the stresses of training both physically and psychologically. It helps improve mobility and flexibility while helping to rejuvenate the mind. Check out Free at Home Yoga Workout Routines
Meditation
Meditation has significant benefits for improving your fitness regime by increasing mental strength and focus, helps injury prevention, and improving your performance. Including meditation as part of your rest day can help maximise your recovery. By allowing your body to reach a highly relaxed state, your heart rate lowers, breathing slows and your nervous system relaxes. This allows your body to recuperate faster and is an excellent practice to introduce regularly into your fitness regime. Here are my favourite guided meditations.
Get Enough Sleep
Beyond adding active rest to your fitness regime, ensuring quality sleep is another important step to maximizing your recovery efforts. High quality sleep helps build muscle faster, allows your brain to rest and recuperate as well as positively impacting your overall wellbeing. A lack of quality sleep can inhibit your efforts in the gym by raising cortisol levels and lowering human growth hormone production. Thus, it is important to get the most out of your sleep.
Final Thoughts
Active recovery not only helps cut recovery time but also can help maintain nutrition goals even on your rest days. By staying active, many people find it easier to adhere to their nutrition plans and therefore maximise gains from your recovery time. Nutrition plays an important role in recovery and understanding how recovery nutrition works is important to learn to maximise recovery.
Allowing your body to properly recover and rejuvenate is crucial in seeing the best results from your fitness regime. Active recovery, when performed correctly can be more beneficial than passive rest. By improving blood circulation, reducing muscle soreness and helps improve overall performance, active recovery is an important building block within your fitness regime.
I’d love to hear from you, what’s your best strategy to recover from your workouts?
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