7 Optimal Recovery Tips You Must Be Doing

As you go about your workout plan to build muscle fast, you need to be paying close attention to the recovery tips that you experience between each workout you do. 

Your progress is going to be strictly limited by how quickly you are able to hit your gym workouts each and every session and that is strictly limited by how quickly you are recovering.

Basically, if your recovery is low, so will be your progress.  So what can you do to help promote a faster overall recovery?

Here are seven great ways to go about the process, all of which will help you see more successful results.

7 Recovery Tips

#1 Foam Roll

First, consider getting involved with some foam rolling. Foam rolling is a classic technique that has been used by athletes for quite time and now you too can see results from including it into your protocol.

For this technique, you’ll simply get a piece of cylindrical foam and roll back and forth over it, wherever you are sore.  You will feel the tight muscle slowly losing its tension as you move over the ‘knot’.

If you do this often, you’ll eventually loosen up and any post workout muscle soreness you may be experiencing will be gone.

#2 Eat Well

Next up, your post workout nutrition will be a game-changer as far as your recovery rate goes. If you are not eating well immediately following each workout you do, make no mistake about it, this will influence the results you see.

Your body is hungry for nourishment after that workout and to deprive it means you just stay in that broken down state longer, delaying progress. Remember, you don’t get stronger and larger while you are in the gym.

In the gym, you actually get weaker. It’s when you’re out of the gym, feeding your body well and recovering that progress is made with your simple diet plan.

Your muscle tissues are like a sponge immediately after each workout you do, ready to soak up the nutrition that you feed yourself.  So eat well – including both protein as well as fast acting carbs as quickly after you finish as possible.

You will notice an immediate difference in how you feel by doing this one simple thing.

#3 Stretch

Stretching post-workout is something that so many people who want to build muscle fast skip over because they just don’t think that it’s going to have many benefits.

And from an aesthetic point, it doesn’t have any direct benefits. But from an indirect viewpoint, it certainly does.

Not only will stretching help to reduce post-workout muscle pain, allowing you to hit the gym sooner, but it can help ensure that you move through a full range of motion while doing your exercises, which then means more progress.

If you aren’t using the full range of motion during any weight lifting movement, you’re only reaping half the results you could be.

Stretching can help prevent this.  Take 10 minutes and get the stretching in.

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#4 Do Light Cardio Training

While it may seem counterintuitive to be training when you should be resting, but light cardio training, as long as the intensity is kept down, is one way to actually speed up your recovery.

The reason for this being the increased blood flow moving to the muscle tissues will help deliver nutrients and oxygen to the cells, which then clears away byproduct that can cause soreness and fatigue.

So if you’re especially sore after a workout, don’t sit around. Get on the treadmill and go for a light walk, or just do some easy cardio on whatever machine you prefer. Just do be sure to keep the resistance low if on the bike or elliptical.

#5 Focus On Sleep

Moving long, sleep is also something that you absolutely must make sure you are looking after. If you aren’t sleeping well each evening, you’re going to pay the price in the recovery that you see.

Sleep is when your body goes into deep repair mode, so when you make a larger amount of recovery progress.

If you’re only getting 5-6 hours per night, this will mean far less time repairing those damaged muscle tissues, which means it’ll take you that much longer to see the full recovery you’re after.

The two most important things for making sure that you are recovering well are taking in good nutrition post workout and sleeping well at night.

Do not neglect these.

#6 De-Stress

Stress is something else that can eat away at your recovery without you even realizing it. Far too many of us lead very stressful lives on a day to day basis, which not only hampers the hormonal levels in the body, making it harder to build muscle from the start, but in addition to that, it also impairs your ability to recover. Those who have high-stress levels will also typically notice lower testosterone concentrations in their body, meaning they have less overall potential to build muscle.

If you feel like you just aren’t making progress and are doing everything right, stress could be the cause.

Evaluate your life and see what may be causing you stress – possibly without even realizing it and then take steps to minimize this.

The more controlled your stress is, the easier it’s going to be for you to feel 100% in each workout you do, giving those sessions your full effort.

#7 Plan Your Workout Properly

Finally, last but not least, make sure that you are planning your workouts to build muscle fast properly. There are many things that will influence how quickly you recover between workouts including your rest time between sets, how much weight you’re lifting, how many sets you do overall, along with the type of exercises you are doing.

Each of these contributes to the total volume, which refers to how much weight you’ve lifted over a certain period of time.

In addition to that, you also need to take into account your own personal recovery ability. Certain people naturally recover more slowly than others, so you can have two people on the same workout programs and each one of them requires a different length of time to make that complete recovery.

Learning your own body and catering your workouts as such is going to be the best way to stay on top of things.

Also keep in mind that each bodybuilding workout you do should have at least 1-2 days of complete rest each week as well, which will allow your CNS to recover.

It’s just as easy to overwork your central nervous system as it is a given muscle group, so you need to be mindful of not only time between working each muscle, but time between workouts period as well.

Conclusion

So there you have the primary factors to know on things you can do to boost your recovery tips.  Recovery is paramount to success, yet so many people who want to build muscle quickly think their job is over the minute they leave the gym.

To see really optimal success with the goal to gain weight fast, you absolutely must be ‘on’ 24/7.  This means being mindful of all that you do and whether it supports or takes away from your results.

-Terry Asher