By Pete Ryan
Part 3 Recovery
(This is part 1 of a 3 part series
about achieving optimal health find parts 2 and 3 at the bottom of this
article)
So far we have covered nutrition and exercise in the last
two articles, so this post we will examine recovery. This might be the most nebulous of the 3
pillars. With nutrition you can monitor
weight, fat levels and muscle mass and get some idea of what to do with your
diet, with exercise you are either getting stronger, or not getting
stronger. However recovery is affected
by your whole life. If you have a
stressful day, you will need extra recovery, if you sleep badly, or do not
reach the right levels of sleep, you will not be recovered, illness affects the
bodies ability to recover. The list goes
on. Recovery is the thing that will vary most from day to day. Most days you will know roughly how much to
eat that coming day, you will have an idea of about the amount of exercise you
should do, but you have no idea how much recovery you will need as things vary
so much.
The number one recovery option is sleep. Sleep is the bedrock of all recovery, why do
you think in those military ‘hell weeks’, they stop the solders sleeping? They
want to see how they deal with being unable to recover, so they get then to do
physical things. Things many of you could
do if fresh, but get them to do it repeatedly as the recovery reserves dwindle.
You see some of the toughest, fitness humans on earth slowly fail one by one
and only the very few actually survive the week. This is due to lack of recovery above all, I
can virtually guarantee that if I gave them adequate sleep between each day
they would survive the ordeal much more easily.
There are two aspects to sleep, duration and depth. Both of
these will vary for person to person to person, but generally 7 or 8 hours of
sleep works for most people. Depth of sleep is a bit more difficult, you need a
whole separate article just to cover the different levels of sleep, needless to
say you should wake up ready to take on the day without stimulants, everyone
can feel a bit tired at some point throughout the day now again, but mostly you
should be able to function without stimulants throughout a normal day.
Assuming you have sleep in place then there are some other
modalities that can aid recovery, but remember, none of these can replace sleep
as the number one recovery tool.
Massage, both self myofascial release and going to get a
massage is a great way to improve recovery. As a massage therapist I rate
massage as a powerful way to aid recovery, but benefits do depend both on those
doing the massage and how your body responds.
Like anything massage isn’t for everyone, but for those it does help, it
is a great way to encourage recovery and relieve muscle soreness.
Stretching, yoga and other similar modalities can help tight
muscles loosen and so aid recovery, they may also improve exercise by allowing
the body to get into better positions during exercise.
Electrical stimulation has been sold to many as a way to
speed recovery, but I am not certain the science is there to prove that is
effective? If you feel it helps, then
give it a try, but if it doesn’t do anything for you then forget about it.
Meditation has been used for centuries to focus the mind and
aid recovery. How well it works depends upon the individual and how practiced
that individual is at meditating. This can be used for a few minutes using an
app on your phone, or continued for hours. If this
helps you then include it into your daily routines, but if it doesn’t
then use the time doing other things.
Things that can affect recovery are stress,
poor nutrition, health issues, over training, excessive systemic inflammation,
and many other factors.
You can get some ideas about to incorporate self myofascial
release into your own exercise by popping over to https://payhip.com/veganbodybuilding
and downloading the book called “Self myofascial release”.
Putting it all together
The secret of achieving the best health and fitness results
is to get your nutrition, exercise and recovery into balance. Like actual balancing, this is not a static
process, things will wobble one way or the other and you will only ever achieve
a momentary second of perfect balance before things change again and more small
tweaks need to be made. So, some
evenings you may need an early night, or an extra snack, while other days you
may need to drop a workout or add high intensity methods to keep reaping
benefits. The secret is to learn your
own body and to try out new things so you can achieve the most benefits from
your health and fitness lifestyle. You
can learn more by reading “An
introduction to vegan fitness and health” over at https://payhip.com/veganbodybuilding
and if you need any further advice feel free to contact me below.
Good luck with your health and fitness journey!
Part 1 - Nutrition
can be found here
Part 2 - Exercise
can be found here
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