Maximizing Your Results: The Importance of Exercise Recovery

Recovery

I am going to provide 2 analogies to help fully understand how recovery plays such a vital role in exercise, health and performance.

Imagine our body as a house, exercise as a storm, and recovery as a lazy repairman. When a storm comes in, it does damage to the house. If the damage isn’t that bad, the lazy repairman won’t come out to fix it.. Now, if a very strong storm came in and damaged the house significantly, the repairman is going to come out and fix it, but because he is lazy and doesn’t want to have to come back out and fix it again, he is going to build the house up bigger and stronger. 

If you have a constant bombardment of storms in a row that cause significant damage and does not allow time for the repairman to come out and fix it, the house is going to keep getting weaker and having many more problems. On the flip side, if you do not have these storms, or they are constant but weak, the lazy repairman won’t come out to build it up bigger and stronger. 

The takeaway is that exercise (stress) of a meaningful degree is required to tell the body something needs to change. Recovery is required to allow the body time to build up bigger and stronger. Without recovery, you are only doing more harm than good. Under recovery is more often than not the problem with lower levels of health and performance rather than overtraining. 

Please refer to the image below, provided by Precision Nutrition. 

This image is another beautiful way to think about how stress and recovery are related. Our goal is to start each day with our recovery tank at 100%. While this is a great goal, it is rarely the case. The frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), duration (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month) and intensity (how potent each stressor or recovery element is) will determine how much water fills or empties our recovery tank. We need to understand stress is necessary for growth in every aspect of life, but if we stress ourselves too much and do not focus on balancing that with recovery, it becomes detrimental to us. The main point I want to get across to people is we will not always start our days off with our recovery tank at 100%. Sometimes it will be 90% other times it may be 20%. Always give yourself grace on any given day, check in with yourself and adjust, to the best of your ability, the stressors and recovery elements. It's okay if you do not perform well for one workout, it does not mean you are weaker, it simply means your recovery tank is a little lower than normal. Some days workouts will feel way harder than normal (maybe your recovery tank is at 50%) and other days you are going to do amazing and dominate your workouts (100% in the recovery tank!). Be kind to yourself, practice finding balance, and ask for help when needed.