Train First, Recover Second

Recovery is the most important part of the training process, right? Everyone says that muscle isn’t made in the gym; it is made after your workout when you are refueling and resting. Yes, fair enough. But that idea can be taken to the extreme. Recovery seems to be more of a trend right now than an actual tool. Especially with professional athletes endorsing recovery modalities they don’t use or can’t explain, if asked questions off-script about the tools. 

People often boast about how seriously they take their recovery. They train Mike Mentzer’s high-intensity interval training two to three times a week (so like 45 minutes maximum per week) and spend countless hours on their recovery. They don’t even get Mike Mentzer’s training right because they’re just going off of what they saw in a short video on social media, never opening one of his training method books. Interesting flex, but to each their own. 

This isn’t a jab at high-intensity training; the method can work if performed properly. It is a jab at the fact that people are not training hard enough or frequently enough to warrant all of the money and time they are spending on recovery. If you don’t create a stimulus to the muscle, through hard and frequent training, to warrant a change, what are you recovering from? 

The truth is, proper nutrition (sorry, no fast food meal preps), stress management, and sleep are going to get you most of the recovery you can get. Tools like cold plunges, red light therapy, saunas, or any other mainstream recovery modality getting hyped about aren’t going to make a huge difference in your recovery. Most likely, the stress of trying to find the time and money to use these tools will outweigh any benefits promised. Shoot to eat mostly clean foods with plenty of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins. Aim to sleep a consistent and quality 8 hours every night. Try your best to manage your stress, as it can quickly counteract any recovery effort you make. 

Skipping gym sessions because “got to recover, man,” raises the same question as before: what are you recovering from? Long days happen to everyone. Days don’t go according to plan. Life sometimes is all about how efficiently you can change plans to keep progressing toward your goals. Get that training session in, and push yourself. Maybe you need to sacrifice an early night to get your workout in, but then you give yourself something to recover from and can feel good about that when you tuck in for the night. Track your workouts, and try to do better each time you step into the gym. Whether that be with more sets, more reps, more weight, shorter rest times, better and more controlled technique at the same weight, or shorter workout time total, beat the record you had last time, and you will keep progressing. Focus on those three recovery modalities mentioned: nutrition, stress management, and sleep. If you can master those, and you are still under-recovering from session to session, maybe it will be time to try out one of the fancy recovery tools all over the internet, or maybe it is time to structure your workouts smarter. Either way, just train hard.