What is recovery?
Recovery – the actions you take or avoid after resistance training with the goal of lowering fatigue, letting the muscle recover and adapt, letting joint inflammation subside and let your brain/nervous system recover aswell. The focus of it is to make full use of the enhanced muscle protein synthesis right after a session, increase performance and allow you to progress at the gym. Also proper recovery is necessary if you want to feel good in your daily life. The main 2 factors of recovery are physical and neurological recovery. In other words, muscle growth/repair and CNS recovery.
Muscle protein synthesis is your muscle recovering and growing after a training session. Muscle protein synthesis is boosted by up to double within the first 24 hours after training, then it drops back down to baseline within 48 hours after training. This means, that getting enough food to grow is especially important on the day of training and the day after. Proper recovery practices also help supercharge your next session, so it’s a good idea to also eat more the day before a big PR (personal record) session.
Theres a few key aspects to recovery. Sleep, nutrition, hydration, stress and fatigue management. Fatigue is the result of a combination of training and psychological stress tiring you out more than sleep, nutrition and hydration can account for.
Sleep – you must get at least 7-9 hours of quality sleep. This is the base requirement for building muscle. You will still grow at 5-6 hours; however your joints will feel achy and the likelihood of injury increases. Muscle doesn’t grow to its maximal ability either. Sleeping well is the most important on the day of training and the day before. The day before training because it increases performance; on the day you trained because it is literally the time that you recover from the session and build the most muscle. Good sleep also promotes CNS recovery, which is completely necessary to feel good and lift with intensity at the gym. For good sleep, aim to fall asleep at the same time each night. Even more importantly, to feel good, wake up at the same time each day. All of that is within an hour of error. For example, sleep at 23:00-00:00, wake up at 07:00-08:00.
This is how I optimize sleep for myself, and how I think you can too. Completely block off sunlight if possible, when you sleep. Sleep in an environment that’s as quiet as you can make it. Use earplugs if you have to. A cool environment (what feels cold, cool or warm is subjective, so you decide for yourself) is essential to sleeping well. Proper oxygen in the air is important, so keep your windows open if you can. Breathing well in your sleep is a must, if you snore you can go get a sleep analysis to see if you don’t have sleep apnea. Nasal strips can also help if the cause of snoring is your nostrils being too narrow to breathe through (asymmetrical nostrils, broken nose, congestion). Sleep alone if possible. Only lay in bed at night, otherwise you might have a hard time falling asleep. If you nap during the day that might also compromise your sleep at night.
Nutrition – you must eat enough if you want to grow. How much you need to eat depends entirely on your body fat level, activity level and goals. The amount of protein you eat also kind of depends on your bodyfat.
If you’re sitting at a very low body fat of 5-10% you will likely barely grow. 10-15% is way more optimal, however at that bodyfact you need to maintain or bulk to grow. 15-20% you can maintain and gain similar amounts to if you bulked. Anything above that is useless for muscle growth and only useful for raw strength.
If you’re very active, you will have to eat more to recover. Activity outside of strength training has been shown to not impact it negatively nearly as much as thought before. However that is only the case if you’re recovering well enough to support both.
If your goal is to lose weight to show off muscle, if you’re healthy and a beginner, you probably shouldn’t do this until after a couple years of training and gaining muscle, as it will be underwhelming. If your body fat level is negatively impacting your life, then losing that fat will help you gain muscle faster as well as feel better. Lower body fat levels have been shown in studies to decrease estrogen and by doing that, increase testosterone. Drinking a lot of water also lowers appetite.
If you want to gain weight, do not do a dirty bulk. Gain as with food that’s as healthy as possible because that will lead to you still feeling good at a higher body fat and won’t produce horrendous habits that would later make cutting a lot harder. The speed at which you gain kind of matters, but gaining the weight slowly (0.5-1kg or 1-2.2lb a week) is probably best.
If your goal is to maintain, that is good. You will gain the most muscle if you maintain at a slightly higher body fat percentage, such as 15-20%. This is mostly anectodal based on what other lifters progress on best.
Protein. The amount of protein you need to eat will be higher in proportion to your weight if you’re cutting to maximize muscle sparing. When you’re on a bulk it matters less how much protein you’re eating and more how much carbs, due to carbs being incredibly protein sparing. About 2.2g of protein per kg of bodyweight (1g/lb of bodyweight) is the most you’ll need as a natural lifter.
If you’re on a bulk, can go to 1.8g per kilogram (0.8g/lb) without any downsides.
If on a cut, should definitely keep protein intake higher, 2.2-3.0g/kg (1-1.4g/lb) to make sure your body doesn’t start metabolizing your muscles instead.
Fats. If you’re a natural lifter, you should prioritize getting healthy fats too, as that is what your body will turn into hormones that enhanced lifters don’t have to worry about. That is the reason why enhanced trainees tend to avoid fats and focus only on carbs and protein. Also fat is extremely calorie dense, especially when compared to carbs and proteins, at 9 calories per gram when compared to carbs and proteins, both of which are around 4g (protein might be lower, can be argued for 3g, however research doesn’t seem to be sure about it). A good amount of fats would be 25% of your calories. That ensures healthy hormone levels.
Carbs. Then the remainder of your calories from carbs to restore your muscle glycogen after workouts, fuel your workouts in general and keep cravings at bay. Eating more carbs can also be a way to increase appetite. A good example is to keep drinking orange juice every few hours to keep your appetite higher.
Hydration – a simple one, simply drink water and make sure to get enough sodium, potassium and magnesium in. To know how much water you should drink, look up a daily water intake calculator. Simply drinking when thirsty is fine, however thirst lags behind the body’s actual hydration status. Sodium – found in large quantities in salt. Potassium – bananas and potatoes are a very good source of it. Magnesium – a good idea to simply supplement with it. There are a lot of versions of magnesium being sold, but the best one for hydration is probably magnesium bisglycinate since it won’t make you immediately need to go empty your bowels.
A very simple option if you need to rehydrate is to get an isotonic drink with a good formula. At most a 1:1 ratio of sodium:potassium and some magnesium is good.
Creatine is a supplement that also helps the muscle hold onto more water. When supplementing with it you might need to drink more water initially to help saturate the water stores in your muscle. It speeds up muscle recovery and slightly increases strength, may have mental benefits.
Proper hydration increases strength, muscle growth (muscle is mostly water afterall) and is necessary to feel good and stay healthy.
Stress management – a very important, often overlooked factor of recovery. Being stressed all the time can chronically increase cortisol levels. High cortisol leads to low testosterone, which leads to less muscle growth and worse quality of life. It also ruins sleep quality and increases muscle wasting, fat gain. Worse sleep ends up making cortisol levels even higher, testosterone lower, and it’s a vicious cycle of worsening sleep quality, gym performance and hypertrophy.
Methods to reduce stress – eliminate as much as possible from your life that stresses you out. Spend time to focus on your breathing, breathing out everything before you breathe in. Improve sleep quality. Eat less sugar, more healthy, unprocessed foods.
If nothing works, look to supplements. Do not look at medications if you can help it, they almost always have horrendous side effects that make them not worth it (specifically benzodiazapines). Examples of supplements that have been proven to reduce cortisol – ashwagandha1 (especially KSM-66, the active ingredient in it is withanoids), CBD supplements (avoid THC due to sleep disruptive effects)2, magnesium bisglycinate3 (depends on the person, for me it helps). These are healthy ways to naturally reduce cortisol. Ashwagandha isn’t supposed to have an immediate noticeable effect, but if your stress hormone is constantly really high, you will feel it as soon as your body begins digesting it.
Fatigue – fatigue management is an active one that you do during your training to make sure that you can recover at all. Usually that will be done with an auto-regulatory approach. For example, if you feel really crappy during a training session, sometimes it’s a good idea to simply do the lowest prescribed amount of sets and get at least the main movements done. That will prevent you from overextending and help keep a healthy relationship with training. When you’re extremely fatigued is when injury is the most likely to happen.
Lifting as heavy as you can on compound lifts, especially to failure, will rapidly raise fatigue. This is likely due to the amount of force you have to produce to move the weight, joint stress, tendon damage and neurological fatigue.
Fatigue will accumulate much slower when all the other recovery factors are in check. Once you feel that fatigue has stalled, or even regressed, your progress in the gym – it’s a good idea to take a deload. Another factor that can show need for a deload is brain fog and obvious mental fatigue.
Deload – fatigue management technique. Usually done as a deload week. Ideal if you continue training during it, just with half the sets, half the weight and half the reps to make it incredibly easy. Flushes fatigue, lets the muscle and CNS recover. After a deload you start off slightly lighter than before you deloaded (less sets and weight), however you can build back up very quickly. A deload is useless if you need another just a few weeks after however, so you must fix what caused the need for it in the first place. You won’t need to deload often if you autoregulate properly.
A way to do a soft deload is to do the bare minimum amount of sets, still at a high intensity, but not compensating for not doing as many sets. Simply do one set for each exercise and rest for a bonus day or 2 between training days.
The first four factors of recovery (sleep, nutrition, hydration, stress management) are all tools to keep fatigue as low as possible and recover as fast as possible. Properly incorporating recovery will let you train more often and heavier without having to deload as often, which will lead to more muscle growth. Also proper daily habits for recovery combined with training will undoubtedly help your quality of life.
Proper recovery is a key factor to ensuring muscle growth and good health, mental and physical, as you train. Sometimes you have actually gotten a lot stronger – but aren’t letting your body fully recover and so you’re masking your strength with fatigue. That’s when you have to deload and reasess if you’re recovering properly.
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