Recovery really is a life hack. 

This is your excuse to go to bed an hour earlier, spend a night out with your friends, or watch that TV show.

 It’ll actually help you hit that workout harder, and get more results from all of your hard work.

Recovery

How to stay on track and get the most out of your 2022 resolutions, or just your habits in general.

 

While recovery is more popular than it used to be, it still seems like something of a luxury, or something you do when you have extra time, and who has that? Today I want to talk about why recovery should be just as important as your other healthy habits, and how putting it on the back burner can actually turn your healthy habits into stressors.

 

Stress

A few stress-free days might be nice for a little while, but eventually you’d get bored without having some kind of responsibility or challenge. But obviously, there is such a thing as too much stress. Think of a bell curve, on one side we are bored with having too little stress, as more stress comes along it starts to grab our attention, and at the top we have a sweet spot. Think of how your habits change when you have a few weeks off work, it’s nice for a bit but eventually that routine and little bit of stress helps us stay on track better. You might also see this in how your kids behave when they’re in and out of school, we work a little bit better under some stress – or when we’re in the stress “sweet spot” at the top of the bell curve. However, if stress then begins to accumulate beyond that sweet spot, that’s when we start to freak out and maybe eventually crash and burn.

 

Of course we all have the normal stressors – work, kids, relationships, finances. But, you also might have some that you’re not aware of that come across as healthy choices. Things like working out, or eating in a calorie deficit working toward a healthy weight – these are healthy choices but they ARE stressors. We can’t really control or get rid of the main stressors in our lives, so how do we stay in the sweet spot without taking away our healthy stressors?

 

This is where rest and recovery come to the rescue.

 

When we recover, we get back to our body’s homeostasis – which is just a fancy word for when we’re feeling good. You feel healthy, you’re moving well, you have energy, etc. Getting back to homeostasis can look like replacing your fluid and glucose after your workout just drained them, or getting back to full strength after being sick or injured, or even some intangibles like feeling mentally restored after some time off work. Stress and recovery are meant to go together. Let me say that again, stress and recovery are meant to go together. I really can’t emphasize it enough. The purpose of stress is to improve performance. When you workout, you are putting your body under stress with the hopes of improving your performance. However, I think we all know that immediately following a workout, we’re actually weaker than we were when we started. But once our bodies have had time to recover, that is when our performance starts to improve. And our new homeostasis is now at a higher level. If I were to go out and run a mile in 6 minutes right this second, I might actually die. But, if I ran three days a week for a year and worked on my speed, while also giving my body time to recover, I might be able to run that fast comfortably and have no problem. The first time I PR’d my back squat, it took all the fight I had in me to hit 205, but after years of constant stress and recovery, I can comfortably move 205 for large sets with no issues.

 

So let’s break down how this is supposed to look. Our body starts in homeostasis. This is just baseline, status quo. Then you encounter a stressor which is anything that disrupts it – remember these can also be good things. Let’s say it’s a sprint on the Assault bike – your heart rate goes way up, your energy needs are higher as your body burns through it’s fuel, your body temperature increases and you start to sweat. Once that stressor hits, we move into the alarm phase, which is where we deal with the stressor and our performance starts to suffer. This is when you’re on calorie 22 of 50 and you start to question you life choices as your body forces you to slow down a little bit. Or that wall ball starts feeling reaaalllllly heavy. If I asked you to sprint on the assault bike for 1 minute for max calories and then as soon as you were done, asked you to do it again, I’m going to guess over 99% of us would do worse. Why? We need to recover.

 

Once you’ve had some time to replenish your body’s nutrients, bring the heart rate back down, give your muscles a break, and test it again in a month, you will probably do better than before when we re-test that Assault bike sprint. So after that alarm phase, ideally we go into the recovery phase. As long as we are replenishing our fuel and not adding in more stressors than we can handle, our bodies should rebuild and repair themselves, and then we will be able to perform even better after a few days. And now our baseline or homeostasis is better than before! So what happens if you skip the recovery phase? Well, you see where the line is headed, your performance will just continue to suffer, and all of your hard work will seem like it’s getting you nowhere. Let’s take a closer look at what that might actually look like.

 

Let’s use sleep as an example, as it’s the BEST form of recovery. When we’re doing sleep right, it improves our mood and ability to handle our emotions, we see improvements in our cognition, attention, and concentration, it helps us lose fat and build lean tissue like bone and muscle, we’re better about to regulate our appetites, and helps our bodies get rid of waste. So not only does it have a ton of advantages, but the other side of the coin might be even stronger. I could like 100 things that can go wrong when we’re sleeping poorly, but just to name a few, on a physical level, we start feeling drowsy, we start seeing problems with our metabolism, and it even increases our risk of cancer. Emotionally, we become more irritable, exhausted, and even depressed. And mentally, we have a hard time staying concentrated and alert, have a harder time making decisions, and have less working memory. The point of all of this? It’s not only harder to function when you’re not recovered, it also severely limits the results that you’re working so hard toward. How can you expect yourself to make healthy food choices, and give 100% in a workout when you’re experiencing the symptoms I just listed? Poor sleep leads to drowsiness, which leads to less productivity, which leads to chronic stress, which leads to poor sleep and the cycle just goes on and on. However, there is a bright side! 1- sleep is not the only form of recovery. If you have a brand new baby, sleep might just not be in the cards for you right now. I’m going to attach a table below to help you better identify where your stressors may be coming from, as well as ways to recover in each area specifically. But I’ll run through a couple here.

 

A lot of us are probably feeling some emotional stress right now. Things being canceled, going through your first holiday without a loved one, shame that we didn’t accomplish what we thought we would in 2021. It’s a lot. Some ways to do some emotional recovery: recognize and express your emotions in an appropriate way. Have a good cry, journal how you feel, talk to someone you trust, GO TO THERAPY! Or even just giving yourself a break from the difficult emotions and intentionally bringing more positive ones. Watch a funny movie, grab coffee with a friend, cuddle a loved one.

 

We are also probably feeling a good amount of mental fatigue. This can looks like having to make big life decisions, being overwhelmed with information, falling behind at work, etc. Some ways to mentally recover? Take a break from the things you’re focusing on, and let your mind do something fun. Get creative and draw or make something with your hands, listen to some music, or research something you’re curious to learn more about. You can still stay mentally engaged, but it doesn’t need to be in a stressful way.

 

This sounds like a lot to take on, I know. And our society has raised us to believe that rest is lazy. I’m here to tell you that it’s not. It’s so important. You won’t reach your goals if you don’t make time for it. It also doesn’t need to be complicated. Think of recovery and a big orange Gatorade pitcher. In order to pour anything out of the spout, it needs to have some Gatorade already in it. Our Gatorade is our recovery, we want to make sure things like regular sleep, fulfilling activity, positive emotions, mindfulness, etc. are filling us up, so that when we come across a stressor and need to pour something out of the spout like being in a calorie deficit, experiencing relationship stress, or dealing with finances, we have recovered enough to have the fuel to take those things on without going crazy. We need the input and the output to be working together in order to keep us in that stress sweet spot.