Exercise Recovery
Your Key to Great Results is Exercise
Recovery
By Steve Edwards
From the Team Beachbody Club - Join Today and Workout to
Win!
 One of the most important topics when it comes to
exercise is how to recover from it. No matter how hard you train, you are only
going to see great results if you do the things that enable your body to
recover from the exercise you do. Let's take a look at how to make the best use
of your time when you aren't bringin' it.
Recovering well is dependent on two
variables: physiology and nutrition. In order to keep this as simple as
possible, let's break your day down into time slots related to your workout.
You'll see that by following a few simple rules you can greatly enhance your
body's ability to recover quickly and get the most out of your exercise
program.
Nutritional considerations
Your body uses different types of
foods for different actions. For this reason, having an eating plan that
supports your exercise program is the most important variable of your day.
 Before we get started, let's first look at the very basics of
your diet. It consists of mainly three things: proteins, fats, and
carbohydrates. Proteins and fats, in the simplest sense, make up our body
tissue. Carbohydrates, which break down into sugars, are used to fuel our body.
Since carbs aren't stored, we need to burn them off, meaning that how many of
them we eat should be directly proportional to how much exercise we are
doing.
Post-exercise. When
it comes to eating for exercise, the most important time slot is immediately
after your workout. Your body will only store up enough glycogen (blood sugar
from carbohydrates) to get you through about an hour or so of hard exercise. At
the end of a workout, our glycogen stores tend to be extinguished and need to
be replenished. The quicker we can replenish these, the faster we will
recover.
This aside is to warn you that
this is the toughest part to understand for most people.
 Since
protein makes up muscle tissue and muscle tissue is what's broken down during
exercise, it makes sense to think we need to consume protein after a workout.
But this isn't how the process works. Protein is absorbed by the body very
slowly, whereas sugar is utilized very rapidly. The longer it takes to get
nutrients after a workout the slower our bodies are able to recover.
Because of this, sugar immediately
after exercise is the body's preferred fuel source. In general, we don't need
any sugar at all and are much better off eating complex carbohydrates that
include fiber and make our body break them down into sugar. However,
post-exercise, the quicker we can replenish our lost blood sugar the faster our
body will begin to recover. So a small amount of sugar after exercise is
essential for efficient recovery. We've known this for a long time, which is
why most "sports" drinks tend to be sugary. So essentially what would be a bad
nutritional strategy most of the time is a good strategy after exercise.
 During the 1990s science unlocked another key when
studies showed that sugar with a small amount of protein - a 4:1 ratio being
optimal - could enhance recovery around 25 percent over sugar alone, and up to
400 percent better than protein alone, when consumed within an hour after a
workout. Again, fat and fiber are left out of this equation. While very
important components of our diet, both fat and fiber interfere with rapid
digestion, which is our goal after finishing a workout. This is the reason that
our P90X® Peak Recovery Formula is designed the way it is.
 During exercise. With the correct
fueling strategy we won't need to eat during a normal workout lasting less than
an hour and a half. However, if you find yourself low on nutrients and need to
eat, you'll want to follow the same rules as you would after a workout. Again,
glycogen replenishment is the goal, so we want to consume easy-to-digest
carbohydrates with very little fiber and fat and little protein.
It's also important to note that your
body can only utilize about 250 or so calories in a given hour, so it almost
never makes sense to take in more than 250–300 cals/hour of sports foods
during exercise. Of course, you can burn far more than 250 calories in an hour.
This is why what you eat over the rest of the day is so vital.
 Pre-exercise. It's best to exercise on an empty
stomach, but the realities of life can make this difficult. Try using a
three-hour rule for meals, meaning that you should not work out for at least
three hours after a full meal. If you need to eat within three hours of your
workout, begin to follow the rules of eating during a workout and start to
minimize the amount of fat and protein you eat, and certainly the amount of
calories. If you need to eat an hour prior to a workout, a 4 to 1 carb/protein
sports meal of less than 300 calories is best because your body will be able to
utilize it during the workout. If you eat a full meal an hour prior to
exercise, most of it will be undigested in your stomach during your workout and
you won't be able to train nearly as effectively.
 Between workouts. This is where your diet should
reflect what you generally hear about nutrition. You want to eat nutrient-rich
foods with plenty of fiber, good fatty acids, lots of protein, and very little,
if any, sugar. As you can see from the above scenarios, you should eat a
carb-heavy diet during and around the time you exercise. This means that for a
balanced diet, you don't want a lot of carbs at other times. This is where your
diet should consist of plenty of fruits, veggies, meats, nuts, and seeds.
Physiological considerations
This is a little simpler than the
nutritional aspects because, well, it's pretty clear when you're exercising and
when you're not. There are still a few tips that can help you recover,
especially when we begin to look at the phases of exercise.
Post-exercise. After
you've finished a workout your body is warm and your muscles are tight because
they've been contracting over and over. Stretching immediately after a workout
is the best time to lengthen your muscles which, in turn, will reap you huge
benefits on the recovery end.
 During exercise. In general, you want to
exercise as hard as your body allows. If you've properly fueled your body with
nutrients and liquids, it should respond well. However, if you've slacked on
these factors, you may bonk (run out of blood sugar) or become dehydrated. No
matter how fastidious we are, these things will happen to us at some point.
Learning to recognize the signals that your body is in trouble can help you
decide when it's better to push on or when it's best to back off.
Both bonking and dehydration can feel
similar. The first signal is generally a lack of energy and the inability to
push a given weight or exercise as well as you normally can. If you have a
heart rate monitor, the inability to achieve your normal high readings is a
sign. And if your workout keeps getting worse, chances are it's due to one of
the above-mentioned factors. Shaking and lightheadedness are also things to be
aware of. If you can't control your form, you're done. Basically, once you've
determined that your body is lacking nutrients, you're always better off ending
a workout early. Causing further breakdown in an unfueled state will do a lot
more harm than good and could set your program back up to two weeks, or longer
if you get injured.
 Pre-exercise. When your body is at
rest it "stiffens" up, a condition called thixotropy. You have bodily fluids
that lube your joints as you exercise. Easy moving warms your body temperature
and makes these fluids more viscous. A thorough warmup includes joint
manipulations and ballistic stretches that get your body ready for the rigors
of exercise. A thoroughly warmed-up body can endure a lot more stress during a
workout, meaning that you'll get more results from the same amount of
effort.
Between workouts.
There are all sorts of things that help your body recover better between
workouts, but none of them is as important or as effective as sleep. When you
sleep, your body's recovery hormones get to work overtime and learning to sleep
better or making time to sleep (or taking naps) is just about the most
effective way to ensure you recover well. The power of sleeping is so vital
that five-time Tour de France winner Eddy Merckx once said, "The Tour is won in
bed."
Between workout
phases. The most effective way to train your body is in phases. You
work on something for a given amount of time and then you focus on something
else. All of the
Beachbody
fitness programs work in phases that generally last from three to 12 weeks.
The time of each phase should vary depending upon the time and intensity of the
training involved. What never changes is that you should also have a rest or
recovery phase as part of your plan.
We generally schedule serendipitous
"recovery phases" around our social calendars. These are times when we give up
trying to work out because we know we'll be too busy. Recognizing that having a
recovery phase is an important part of an exercise program can help you get the
most out of these periods. A recovery phase generally involves doing
low-intensity exercise and avoiding intense work that causes a lot of muscle
tissue breakdown. When we plan recovery phases ourselves, they often contain no
exercise. While this works, it's better if we were to do some light exercise
designed to enhance our body's natural ability to recover.
 When we train hard we cause a chronic condition called cumulative
microtrauma. For a variety of reasons it can't be avoided because it's caused
by some of the natural byproducts of hard training, like lactic acid build-up
and high-threshold muscle cell motor unit recruitment. Therefore, recovery
cycles are designed so that you exercise in a way that doesn't let these things
happen. You end up doing more easy aerobic work and stretching that oxygenates
your blood and builds up capillaries, which has the effect of building your
body's capacity to handle more intense training during the next round of your
given program.
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