The New Post-Workout Recovery Window
The Post-Workout Window
When it comes to speeding up recovery from a ball-busting
workout, no single time period may be as important as the post-workout window.
After the last rep, your main focus should shift to recovery so that you can
train heavier, more often, and with greater intensity. Nutrition obviously
plays a crucial role, but there's more you can do. Tapping into your
parasympathetic nervous system response with specific strategies can also
expedite recovery.
Do One of These Things After Training
Do at least one of the following techniques anywhere from
5-15 minutes after your last rep and you'll come back stronger and more
motivated each passing day.
1 – Self-Directed Soft Tissue Work
Though traditional self-myofascial release techniques like
foam rolling play a minor role in preparing you for a workout, these techniques
are a highly effective way to recover AFTER lifting. From limiting delayed
onset muscle soreness to aiding in lymphatic drainage, rolling may just be the
quickest and easiest way to get the recovery process going.
In your post-training window, put a priority on addressing
the soft tissues that were more highly active during that day's workout. For
example, if you hit legs, then your post-workout rolling should focus on the
muscles of the legs. It's not rocket science, but here's where it gets
interesting.
When using foam rolling in the pre-training routine, pick a
targeted problem area that you're objectively working to remediate. However,
it's the opposite for sparking recovery. The recovery window is the time to
work entire tissues, spend time on multiple segments, and really
"waste" some time down on the floor addressing every aspect of the
region.
Foam Rolling
To get the most out of your practice, place an emphasis on
addressing large superficial muscles as opposed to small acute muscles of the
body. For example, rolling the glutes thoroughly from origin to insertion would
be more appropriate than hitting trigger points on the piriformis. Take your
time. Get the rest of your body that's not on the roller in a good comfortable
position and start rolling away.
2 – Static and Dynamic Oscillatory Stretching
While stretching in the pre-training routine has been
vilified, it still plays a minor roll in a well-designed dynamic warm-up
sequence when active oscillatory stretches are prioritized over long,
static-based stretching. But again, similar to foam rolling, the opposite
applies to the post-training window.
After training, static stretching can be another great
mechanism for recovery, especially when coupled with self-myofascial release
techniques on the same tissue segments. Stretching in this window allows more
of a pliable neural response to tissues due to increased amounts of blood flow
and lubrication on active and adjacent joints in the kinematic chain.
In other words, more contractile muscle tissue will be
targeted with these static stretches since tendons and non-contractiles are
usually the limiting factor in any longer duration stretch being practiced on
"cold" tissues.
Holding static stretches from 30-90 seconds while
maintaining optimal body alignment in other regions of the body, most notably
the spine and pelvis, can stimulate a recovery response in the parasympathetic
nervous system due to receptors found in the soft-tissues themselves.
While stretches can theoretically be held for much longer, a
majority of athletes can't maintain proper body alignment in stretches lasting
over 90 seconds. And as soon as alignment is lost, compensation patterns kick
in and the deep-targeted muscular stretch that was achieved is lost and
replaced by poor postures and injurious positions.
Follow up the tissues you addressed in your foam rolling and
self-myofascial release work with static-based stretching for optimal recovery
benefit. Most people will have a great amount of success with the
implementation of foam rolling and stretching in the post-workout window, but
if you want to cover all your bases, read on.
3 – Deep Diaphragmatic Breathing Techniques
Just because you breathe doesn't mean you know how to
optimally breathe, especially when it comes to using your breath as a recovery
mechanism. Without boring you with a patho-anatomy lesson of the respiratory
tract and its response with the endocrine, musculoskeletal, and neural systems,
let's break this down. For the most part, people present with one of two
different types of breathing patterns, chest breathing or belly breathing.
While "belly" breathing is ideal due to the
utilization of the diaphragm moving at full range of motion and capacity in the
visceral wall, athletes more commonly present with dysfunctional chest
breathing patterns. Let's try to picture what a dysfunctional pattern would
look like.
Ever been winded after sprints and gasping for air? You most
likely were breathing with your chest and ancillary secondary respiratory
muscles including the scalene group and pec minor, and your traps were moving
your chest and shoulders up and down as you sucked air into your lungs.
Imagine using these same mechanics, but in a resting state,
never truly tapping into your diaphragm, but rather using the small respiratory
muscles and overloading them. This is what we want to avoid.
By monitoring your respiratory rate and tempo of breathing
during stretching, foam rolling, or as a drill on its own, you can shift to a
more optimal use of the diaphragm and incorporate deep breathing strategies
that will help in the recovery process.
Many times, volitionally keying in on the breath, using an
extended inhalation and exhalation between 2-6 seconds, will be enough to have
the diaphragm moving and responding like we want it to. If this applies to you,
focus on breathing while completing your other techniques in the
parasympathetic post-workout window.
If you find yourself struggling with deep breathing
techniques, spend 3-5 minutes and just lie on your stomach while simply
breathing. This position allows your diaphragm to push into the ground and
receive more proprioceptive feedback to hone the movement pattern.
Bring in air for 4 or so seconds.
Pause for a second or two with a full set of lungs.
Exhale over an 8 count and repeat.
Though we're working on breathing techniques to target
recovery, these drills can also be built in throughout the day to maintain a
recovery balance in the body. Hey, you have no excuse not to practice breathing
as you do it a few thousand times a day.
4 – Active Lymphatic Drainage
This may be the most simple method to speed recovery, but
it's very effective. As you train a muscle group, increased blood flow is
siphoned to the area in order to continue to fuel the activity. This increased
local blood flow also triggers a certain amount of fluid accumulation locally
from the interstitial fluid balance, which is more commonly noticed as the
prolonged pump effect of a tough workout.
While the lymphatic system is pivotal to human function, too
much local lymph can limit the recovery process of local tissues and the system
as a whole. Having control over the amount of local lymph is pivotal to
expediting recovery. We can do this in a few ways.
Raise Your Arms or Legs
First, we can use gravity to our advantage and use a
systemic drain by elevating extremities above the level of the heart in order
to push lymphatic fluid back into central circulation.
On lower-body training days, this may be as simple as lying
on your back and elevating your feet and legs (allowing a little knee bend)
using a short plyo box.
For upper body training, just place the arms overhead in a
relaxed position to enhance drainage.
Go for a Lazy Walk
A second simple mechanism to reduce lymphatic pooling is by
using low-level active recovery activities such as walking and biking. The
active muscle contractions place pressure on the passive veins and lymphatic
vessels to push fluid back into central circulation. Walking slowly for a few
minutes is as much as you need.
Bonus: For all you overachievers out there, graded
compression bands or garments such as tights and socks can be a great addition
to your recovery routine as these garments place pressure on the vasculature
system and enhance the active muscle pump above. Your best bet is to use a
combination of all of these mechanisms of limiting and reversing lymphatic
pooling by using compression garments while utilizing gravity and active
recovery.
Drinking Plazma
And Don't Forget Nutrition
If you really want to spark the recovery process, you better
start prioritizing your recovery WHILE you're training by using advanced
workout nutrition like Plazma™ or directly after training with Mag-10®.
I've had a great amount of success placing these formulas
into the programs of my strength and endurance-based athletes. Though the
post-workout window is still highly advantageous, it becomes less effective if
you don't have your pre- and peri-nutrition in check in order to fuel your
training in the first place.
Why All This Works
Our performances and results depend on how we're best able
to utilize the central nervous system to spike anabolic hormonal output,
responsive vital signaling, and a host of other physiological mechanisms that
set the table for progression.
To the same point, we can tap the parasympathetic nervous
system to expedite the recuperative abilities. Simply put, the quicker we can
reverse the sympathetic response and make a shift towards a stronger
parasympathetic response, the more complete and controllable the rest of the
recovery process will be.
As the parasympathetic nervous system response takes over
the body, a few key things happen in order to spur recovery. First, the human
vital signs, including heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure, lower in
order to gain and maintain a more restful state. These three variables are also
highly trainable using the specific drills described above.
The longer you stay in a sympathetic state after training,
the more elevated inflammatory markers become and the harder it is to
eventually reverse the central nervous system response to start recovery.
Also, if you think about this in practical terms, the longer
you stay in a jacked-up state, the less overall time you have to recover
between training sessions. For some of us that train daily, delaying the
parasympathetic response even a few hours can make a marked difference in
recovery as a whole, and especially in high central nervous system dependent
activities.
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