What’s The Best Way To Recover Quickly After Exercise?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

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In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝I know that if I don’t push myself when exercising I won’t get much benefits, but if I do push myself then the next day often I’m too sore to exercise, is this just a matter of finding the right balance, or is there another way to reduce the after effects?❞

Balance certainly is good! And while (for most people, most of the time) it’s good to push one’s limits at least a little*, it’s important to push things carefully, building things up gradually, so as to avoid injury or, on the lighter end of things, the soreness that you describe.

^{*Because the body is an efficient organism, and so it won’t “waste” resources developing something that appears to be good enough already; therefore, if something is failing, it won’t get given improvements, so training to failure can be important if we want to get stronger/fitter/faster/suppler/etc.}

Often, post-exercise muscular soreness is a matter of the body simply not being used to that level (and/or that kind) of exercise, as we talked about all so recently in: Haven’t Exercised In A While? Start Here!

On which note, yes, the kind of exercise matters, including when we do a warm-up before our main exercise: Are You Making This Warm-Up Mistake?

If you want to keep things simple with a more generalist approach, then likely what you want is: One Morning Routine To Fix (Nearly) All Stiffnesses

As for traditional methods of recovery such as massage guns, ice, and so forth, there was some research into this recently, whereby researchers (Dr. Agata Stanek et al.) investigated the matter by doing a randomized controlled trial involving 80 recreational runners, wherein they compared ice massage, percussive massage (massage guns), combined treatment, and passive rest after strenuous eccentric calf exercise.

The results, in few words:

• Reactive strength: all groups improved over 72 hours, but combined treatment produced the greatest improvement (+0.62 m/s), followed by ice massage (+0.52 m/s), percussive massage (+0.49 m/s), and passive rest (+0.38 m/s), but combined treatment improved reactive strength 0.24 m/s more than passive rest.
• Muscle and tendon stiffness: all three active treatments produced greater reductions in stiffness than passive rest, affecting both heads of the gastrocnemius muscle and the Achilles tendon. Reductions relative to passive rest ranged from 1.50–2.27 kPa in the gastrocnemius and 22.84–38.92 kPa in the Achilles tendon.
• Muscle soreness: soreness decreased more with active treatments than passive rest. The additional reductions were 1.20 points with ice massage, 1.30 with percussive massage, and 1.35 with combined treatment. After 72 hours, soreness scores were 0.5, 0.3, and 0.1, respectively, compared with 1.5 after passive rest.
• Perceived recovery and exertion: perceived exertion decreased more with all active treatments than with passive rest. Perceived recovery improved most with ice massage (+2.95 points), followed by combined treatment (+2.35), and then by percussive massage (+0.95).
• Lactate dehydrogenase: LDH activity, a marker of exercise-related cellular stress, declined in all four groups, but none of the active treatments produced a significantly greater reduction than passive rest at 72 hours.

That’s a lot of numbers, so to put it in fewer words still: recovery was best when multiple methods were used, but doing something was better than doing nothing in each case.

You can find the paper in full, here: Effects of repeated ice massage, percussive massage, and combined recovery on 72-h calf muscle–tendon recovery after eccentric exercise in recreational runners: a randomized controlled trial

Want to learn more?

For more post-workout strategies, check out:

Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise

Take care!