Recovery between workouts is important. It helps you get fitter, stronger, and leaner. But recovery doesn’t just happen by accident.
“Active recovery” means you chase that recovery by doing some movement. Get your circulation going to clean out waste products and replenish your body. Lift your spirits and get those feel-good hormones circulating.
Active recovery not only helps to keep you in the habit of regular exercise, it also enhances your recovery between exercise sessions better than complete rest alone. Helping you feel stronger for your next workout.
Today, just get your body moving for at least 20 minutes. Do something you enjoy – something that gets your heart a-pumping’ and your limbs a-flapping’, and have fun!
You’ll feel rejuvenated, full of mojo, and stronger for your next workout.
Just remember: This activity should be relatively easy. Find an activity (outside of the gym) that will provide a change of pace and leave you feeling better than when you started.
What’s the difference between active recovery and aerobic recovery?
Active recovery is an open “anything goes” approach to movement. We emphasize getting outside, variety, and a sense of play. For aerobic recovery, depending on the level of the client and their training track, we ask them to move in a systematic, repetitive fashion such as rowing, cycling, hiking, or running for 30-90 minutes while maintaining a steady heart rate – usually under 150 or so – although this will sometimes depend on age.
Here’s the description for aerobic recovery :
Today’s workout is an easy aerobic recovery session. Your goal is to get outside or find some play-oriented activity that you enjoy and get active and moving for 60-90 minutes. Make your effort noticeable, but not so much that you can’t breathe comfortably through your nose the whole time. That means that your heart rate will probably stay below about 150 bpm (beats per minute).
What is “aerobic recovery”?
Recovery between workouts is important. It helps you get fitter, stronger, and leaner. But recovery doesn’t just happen by accident.
“Aerobic recovery” means you chase that recovery by doing some movement, and that you’re specifically trying to keep your heart rate in a certain range.
This is essentially another form of active recovery, but with a little more attention on how hard and long you’re working.
Like always, look for activities that are fun and enjoyable in their own right – things that you’d do even if they didn’t count as “exercise.” Preferably, find things that get you outdoors.
These are longer, slightly more strenuous sessions than your other active recovery sessions, they also help build important adaptations that improve your performance in future workouts – which improves your results from training.
Can I take the day completely off on my Active Recovery days?
The Active Recovery days can be done as days off. We prefer that you do something physical, and find a way to work some open-ended easy movement into your day, even if that’s just walking to the grocery store. But, if you want to just take the day off entirely and focus on something else, that’s ok. It’s your choice.
Also overtraining is not sleep deprivation, soreness, or systemic or musculo-skeletal fatigue due to excessive training volume. Overtraining is a neuroendocrine beat down associated with excessively intensive work – more rest won’t necessarily help, the reduced intensity will.
There are many recovery techniques people generally use to stress control, massage, sleep, contrast hydrotherapy, hydration, recreation, stretching, and chiropractic treatment top the list of promising recovery techniques. While none of these are foreign to us, or even new to sports training, but we’ve no evidence that they make measurable differences in accelerating the development of elite performance. We can appreciate the potential these modalities offer to comfort, but we are not seeing the increased performance.
