Sports Recovery
Recovery, this is a hot topic for fitness influencers and biohackers and it makes it hard to know what is truly worth the time and money invested.
First up is sleep. Everyone has heard how important sleep is for recovery and it feels cliche bringing it up, but I would be remiss if I didn’t. Sleep is the key stone for all recovery. This is where your body repairs the damage done and the brain clears out metabolic waste. Sleep is of an almost inexpressible paramount importance when it comes to recovery. Sleep is important to the degree that if you aren’t getting enough quality sleep, stop reading and focus on that. Nothing else that you do will get you close to the benefits you can get from sleep and will be largely a waste of time and effort in the absence of enough quality sleep.
Next up is nutrition, especially protein. Traditional protein recommendations have been set exceedingly low, especially for anyone participating in athletic activity. Ideally aim for 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight at a minimum, with 1.8 to 2 grams being more ideal. This will feel like a lot of protein but you have to remember that the only place where the body stores protein is in the muscle. Protein is needed to help repair damaged tissue so if it is not available through the diet, the body will either not repair the tissue or take the protein from somewhere else aka you lose muscle somewhere else. It has been shown that increasing protein intake independent of training can increase muscle protein synthesis aka building muscle. For recovery, you also typically want to be calorie positive. This makes sure that there is adequate fuel available for the body to replenish what training or sport depleted and prepare for the next bout.
If your nutrition and sleep are not in check, stop there. They are the two biggest things you can do for performance enhancement and recovery. Now we enter the world of supplemental recovery tools. I want to stress again, these are only effective if sleep and nutrition are dialed in, you cannot hack your way around poor sleep and poor nutrition.
In the category of easy to do and financially accessible tools to use for recovery is foam rolling. There are not a ton of high quality studies done on foam rolling but there are a few general consensus. Foam rolling can increase the range of motion, and increase power output in the limbs rolled and can also decrease soreness. Now many studies did look at lactate clearance as well and found that lactate clearance did improve some with foam rolling, however more recent research has found that lactate doesn’t have the muscle soreness effects that we used to think it did so what that data actually means is up in the air.
The last tool I wanted to cover was cold water or the infamous ice bath. Ice baths have become very popular in recent years and more and more social figures push for their use. But the context around their use matters. This now comes down to what is the goal of the individual. For weight lifters trying to put on muscle mass, cold exposure right after training actually decreases muscle mass gains. This is because the cold water helps blunt the inflammation response which serves as a trigger for the body to adapt and change. If that signal never gets sent, the body does not build new/more muscle. That being said, there are improvements in soreness and subsequent performance benefits in more endurance based individuals like runners, and soccer players. These individuals are not trying to build more muscle, they typically want soreness to feel better quicker so they can repeat bouts of training. So what should an athlete do? If you want muscle mass growth, either don’t use cold therapy or wait at least a couple hours after you finish training to get in the water. If you are not concerned about muscle mass growth, cold therapy can help reduce soreness and help you feel ready to train quicker. There are many, many facets to the use of ice baths for recovery from water temperature, to timing, to duration in the water to water versus cold packs. If you decide you want to use cold water exposure, I would implore you figure out what your goals are first then look at all the different parameters and do your research.
Hopefully this helps clear a little of the air around recovery and what you can do to help get your body ready to go again.
