How To Speed Up Recovery After A Workout (According To Actual Science)

Has your enthusiasm ever been greater than your ability, when it comes to exercise?

Perhaps you leapt excitedly into a new kind of exercise, or maybe you made a reprise of something you used to do, and found out the hard way you’re not in the same condition you used to be?

If you’ve ever done an exercise session and then spent the next three days recovering, this one’s for you. And if you’ve never done that? Well, prevention is better than cure!

Post-exercise stretching probably won’t do much to help

If you like to stretch after a workout, great, don’t let us stop you. Stretching is, generally speaking, good.

But: don’t rely on it to hasten recovery. Here’s what scientists Afonso et al. had to say recently, after doing a big review of a lot of available data:

❝There wasn’t sufficient statistical evidence to reject the null hypothesis that stretching and passive recovery have equivalent influence on recovery.

Data is scarce, heterogeneous, and confidence in cumulative evidence is very low. Future research should address the limitations highlighted in our review, to allow for more informed recommendations.

For now, evidence-based recommendations on whether post-exercise stretching should be applied for the purposes of recovery should be avoided, as the (insufficient) data that is available does not support related claims.❞

Source: The Effectiveness of Post-exercise Stretching in Short-Term and Delayed Recovery of Strength, Range of Motion and Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

…and breath! What a title.

Hot and Cold

Contrast bath therapy (alternating hot and cold, which notwithstanding the name, can also be done in a shower) can help reduce muscle soreness after workout, because of how the change in temperature stimulates vasodilation and vasoconstriction, reducing inflammation while speeding up healing:

Contrast Water Therapy and Exercise Induced Muscle Damage: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

If doing this in the shower isn’t practical for you, and you (like most people) have only one bathtub, then cold is the way to go for the most evidence-based benefits:

Whole-Body Cryotherapy in Athletes: From Therapy to Stimulation. An Updated Review of the Literature

Eat protein whenever, carbs after

Eating protein before a workout can boost muscle protein synthesis. Be aware that even if you’re not bodybuilding, your body will still need to do cell replacement and repair, including in any muscle tissue that got damaged* during the workout

If you don’t like eating before a workout, eating protein after is fine too:

Pre- versus post-exercise protein intake has similar effects on muscular adaptations

*Note: muscle tissue is supposed to get damaged (slightly!) during many kinds of workout.

From lactic acid (that “burn” you feel when exercising) to microtears, the body’s post-workout job is to make the muscle stronger than before, and to do that, it needs you to have found the weak spots for it.

That’s what exercise-to-exhaustion does.

Eating carbs after a workout helps replace lost muscle glycogen.

For a lot more details on optimal nutrition timing in the context of exercise (carbs, proteins, micronutrients, different kinds of exercise, etc), check out this very clear guide:

International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutrient timing

Alcohol is not the post-workout carb you want

Shocking, right? But of course, it’s very common for casual sportspeople to hit the bar for a social drink after their activity of choice.

However, consuming alcohol after exercise doesn’t merely fail to help, it actively inhibits glycogen replacement and protein synthesis:

Alcohol Ingestion Impairs Maximal Post-Exercise Rates of Myofibrillar Protein Synthesis following a Single Bout of Concurrent Training

Also, if you’re tempted to take alcohol “to relax”, please be aware that alcohol only feels relaxing because of what it does to the brain; to the rest of the body, it is anything but, and also raises blood pressure and cortisol levels.

As to what to drink instead…

Hydrate, and consider creatine and tart cherry supplementation

Hydration is a no-brainer, but when you’re dehydrated, it’s easy to forget!

Creatine is a very well-studied supplement, that helps recovery from intense exercise:

International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine

Tart cherry juice has been found to reduce muscle damage, soreness, and inflammation after exercise:

Powdered tart cherry supplementation demonstrates benefit on markers of catabolism and muscle soreness following an acute bout of intense lower body resistance exercise

Wondering where you can get tart cherry powder? We don’t sell it (or anything else), but here’s an example product on Amazon.

And of course, actually rest

That includes good sleep, please. Otherwise…

Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Acute Skeletal Muscle Recovery after Exercise

Rest well!

Hearing is important, not only for convenience, but also for cognitive health—as an inability to participate in what for most people is an important part of social life, has been shown to accelerate cognitive decline:

14 Powerful Strategies To Prevent Dementia ← one of them is looking after your hearing

To this end, we’ve written before about ways to retain (or at least slow the loss of) your hearing, here:

5 Ways To Avoid Hearing Loss

But, what if, despite our best efforts, your hearing is declining regardless, or is already impaired in some way?

Working with the hand we’ve been dealt

So, your hearing is bad and/or deteriorating. Assuming you’ve ruled out possibilities of fixing it, the next step is how to manage this new state of affairs.

One thing to seriously consider, sooner than you think you need to, is using hearing aids. This is because they will not only help you in the obvious practical way, but also, they will slow the associated decline of the parts of your brain that process the language you hear:

ACHIEVE study finds hearing aids cut cognitive decline by 48%

…and here’s the paper itself:

Recruitment and baseline data of the Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders (ACHIEVE) study: A randomized trial of a hearing loss intervention for reducing cognitive decline

Furthermore, hearing aid use can significantly reduce all-cause mortality:

Association between hearing aid use and mortality in adults with hearing loss in the USA: a mortality follow-up study of a cross-sectional cohort

Your ears are not the only organs

Remember, today’s about dealing with hearing loss, not preventing it (for preventing it, see the second link we dropped up top).

With this in mind: do not underestimate the usefulness of learning to lipread.

Lipreading is not a panacea; it has its limitations:

• You can’t lipread an audio-only phonecall, or a podcast, or the radio
• You can’t lipread a video call if the video quality is poor
• You can’t lipread if someone is wearing a mask (as in many healthcare settings)
• You can’t lipread multiple people at once; you have to choose whose mouth to watch (or at least, you will miss the first word(s) each time while switching)
• You can’t lipread during sex if your/their face is somewhere else (may seem like a silly example, but actually communication can be important in sex, and the number of times this writer has had to say “Say again?” in intimate moments is ridiculous)

However, it can also make a huge difference the rest of the time, and can even be a superpower in times/places when other people’s hearing is nullified, such as a noisy environment, or a video call in which someone’s mic isn’t working.

The good news is, it’s really very easy to learn to lipread. There are many valid ways (often involving consciously memorizing mouth-shapes from charts, and then putting them together one by one to build a vocabulary), but this writer recommends a more organic, less effort-intensive approach:

1. Choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, and for which video you already know what is being said (such as by using subtitles first, or a transcript, or perhaps the person is delivering a famous speech or reciting a poem that you know well, or it’s your favorite movie that you’ve watched many times).
2. Now watch it with the sound off (assuming you do normally have some hearing; if you don’t, then you’re probably ahead of the game here) and just pay close attention to the lips. Do this on repeat; soon you’ll be able to “hear” the sounds as you see them made.
3. Now choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, for which video you do not already know what is being said. You’ll probably only get parts of it at first; that’s ok.
4. Now learn the rest of what they said in that video (by reading a transcript or such), and use it like you used the first video.
5. Now repeat steps 3 and 4 until you are lipreading most people easily unless there is some clear obfuscation preventing you.

This process should not take long, as there are only about 44 phonemes (distinct sounds) in English, and once you’ve learned them, you’re set. If you speak more languages, those same 44 phonemes should cover most of most of them, but if not, just repeat the above process with the next language.

Remember, if you have at least some hearing, then most of the time your lipreading and your hearing are going to be working together, and neither will be as strong without the other—but if necessary, well-practised lipreading can indeed often stand in for hearing when hearing isn’t available.

A note on sign language:

Sign language is great, and cool, and useful. However, it’s only as useful as the people who know it, which means that it’s top-tier in the Deaf community (where people will dodge hearing-related cognitive decline entirely, because their social interaction is predominantly signed rather than spoken), and can be useful with close friends or family members who learn it (or at least learn some), but isn’t as useful in most of the wider world when people don’t know it. But if you do want to learn it, don’t let that hold you back—be the change you want to see!

Most of our readers are American, so here’s a good starting place for American Sign Language ← this is a list of mostly-free resources

Enjoy!