Active Recovery for athletes
“Your best ability is your availability.”
As any athlete knows, making it through the season without injuries & fatigue can be challenging. Taking good care of your body so you can play your best on game day sounds easy at face value, but how exactly do we go about it? What are the different ways I can get myself feeling fresh after an intense workout, practice, or game? One simple, & often overlooked answer - active recovery.
You read that right. Active recovery (ACT) is a tool utilized by the world’s greatest athletes to bounce back from training/competition. Some examples of this modality include:
Cycling
Swimming
Yoga
Mini Trampoline Bouncing
Light-intensive exercise
Studies have shown that active recovery after competition is in fact more beneficial than (PAS) passive recovery (aka sitting on the couch watching Stranger Things). A study by New Zealand researcher, Dr. Nicholas D Gill, reported
“The ACT intervention showed 88.2% recovery after 84 hours. The PAS recovery was significantly less than the ACT.” (Gill et al., 2006)
Now you may be asking yourself, “why was I always told to rest or stay off my feet?” There’s no doubt that getting adequate rest plays an important role in recovery. However, sleep is what most suggestions mean when they say to get “rest”. Extended periods of sitting reduces the necessary blood flow & lymphatic circulation needed to clear out the biomarkers found in blood after experiencing muscle damage.
We can all agree that the stiffness we encounter afterwards is not ideal. Muscle adhesions & inflammation are the main culprits for this feeling. Once again, active recovery allows the body to restore mobility & joint ranges of motion through movement of the limbs & stretching of the tissue. As I often like to think, “movement is medicine.”
Hopefully by now you get the idea behind the importance of active recovery. If you’re interested in learning more about different ways to implement a recovery routine, enter your email below & you’ll receive (5) of my favorite techniques you can do at home NOW.
“A body in motion, stays in motion. A body in rest, stays at rest.”
