How to recover properly after exercise
For athletes, post-exercise recovery is vital to healthy training and performance regimes as it significantly contributes to improvement and development in high-level sporting endeavours. To benefit from this recovery, it’s recommended that your team of health professionals apply their research into training, performance, and recovery into your program to include a variety of techniques.
Some examples of effective post-exercise recovery techniques include:
Sleep
Sleep plays a vital role in improving both overall health and athletic performance. It does so by allowing the heart to rest, giving cells and tissues time to repair and giving your body time to recover.
Evidence shows that both increased quantity and quality of sleep assists can boost athletic performance.
Hydration
It’s well known that adequate hydration is essential for the body to function and thrive.
Water intake is integral to support and maintain blood volume, regulate temperature, and allow for proper muscular function. When the body sweats through exercise, fluids are lost that need replacing to prevent heatstroke, decline in muscle function, poor performance, and dehydration.
For more information, visit our Hydration page.
Adequate nutrition
Consuming a balanced diet is essential for high performing athletes to be able to function optimally on and off the sporting arena. By establishing a solid foundation of a well-balanced diet to meet nutrition needs performance can be enhanced benefiting training, recovery, and elite ranking.
For more information, visit our Building a Balanced Diet page.
Active recovery
Active recovery is a workout performed at lesser resistance, lower intensity or reduced power than your typical workouts.
Active recovery has many benefits such as promoting muscle recovery, balancing high intensity training programs and reducing muscle tightness and soreness.
Examples of active recovery include:
- Walking
- Swimming
- Cycling leisurely
- Yoga
- Mobility work
Passive recovery
Passive recovery involves simply letting your body rest.
Passive recovery is particularly useful for endurance athletes and when fatigue levels are high, either physically or mentally.
