Recovery Tools: Trendy Fitness Trend or Necessary?

Like many things, it depends. What are you recovering from?

It seems like every week there is a new recovery tool showing up in the Fitness industry. When I started as a personal trainer 15 years ago, the options were pretty limited. Recovery tools consisted of old, warped whiteish/yellowish foam rollers and a lacrosse balls. If you’ve been a coach for awhile, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

My how things have changed!

Today, we’ve got access to muscle stim units, vibrating rollers, therapy guns, compression sleeves, hot and cold therapy, floss bands, about 400 different kinds of foam rollers and so much more. People are becoming obsessed with recovery methods! But wait. What are these people truly “recovering” from?

There are times when you actually need to recover from a tough training session, but it happens less than you think.

Here are some things that might actually be contributing to your need to recover. (Even more than those workouts you’re doing, or not.)

Lack of quality sleep
Poor nutrition and/or hydration
Lifestyle choices
Terrible program design
Compromised exercise technique
Daily posture
Hard training sessions

Sure, there are many more, but let’s dig a bit deeper into the things I listed above, shall we??

Sleep Quality

No one ever wakes up from 5 hours or crappy sleep and says “ I feel fantastic!” Most people feel terrible after a bad night of sleep. When I sleep like rubbish, I tend to get more random tweaks, twinges and achy joints. These aches seem to sprout up out of nowhere and sometimes last a few days.

If you aren’t sleeping, you aren’t recovering.

Don’t believe me?

Here is a study that shows how improved sleep can reduce pain!

Do yourself a favor and find a way to get those 8 hours a night. You can thank me later.

Nutrition and hydration

This one may seem like a no brainer. Nutrition and hydration absolutely play a role in how you feel, function and recover.

If you want healthy, functional skeletal muscle, proper hydration is non negotiable.

Here’s an excerpt from a study on muscle function and dehydration:

Normal skeletal muscle function is affected by altered physiologic states such as dehydration. Exercise performance decreases as less blood is available for perfusion of active skeletal muscle. Blood flow to exercising muscles is significantly reduced with dehydration due to reductions in blood pressure and perfusion pressure.4,5 Sweating is maintained by intracellular water shifting to the extracellular space, resulting in cell dehydration and adversely affecting skeletal muscle cell function.6 Dehydration negatively affects muscle performance by impeding thermal regulation, altering water movement across cell membranes, and interfering with actin-myosin cross-bridge formation.

Here’s a link to the full study

Now, let’s touch upon nutrition. There are several factors to discuss when it comes to nutrition so I’m going to make this very simple.

Limited protein intake can result in a loss in muscle mass- not good!
Eating too many calories can result in weight gain and increased body fat. Who knew?
Food sensitivities and allergies are very real and certain foods may cause chronic inflammation, which can lead to muscle and joint pain.
Most of you know what is healthy and what is unhealthy. If I put a plate of rice, broccoli and chicken next to some chili cheese fries, you KNOW which one is healthier. The question is, are you disciplined enough to pick the healthier choice the majority of the time?
A lot of the time we eat way too fast. Ever inhale your food to the point of overeating and then feel like crap after? Slow down!
While eating too many calories leads to weight gain, eating too few isn’t the answer either. Proper fueling is vital for performance, especially if you are crushing workouts. If you are under eating, you aren’t performing at your highest level.

In order to keep this brief, I won’t get into specific solutions, but just know that if you’re not drinking enough water and you’re not eating appropriately for your lifestyle and training sessions, you’ll feel like crap and be searching for the latest and greatest recovery tool.

Lifestyle choices

Here I’ll basically use lifestyle choices interchangeably with habits. Habits can be good or bad, but you rarely hear people talking about their good habits.

It’s usually something like..

I drink too much on the weekend. It’s really a bad habit of mine.
I always need something sweet after dinner. I know it’s a bad habit.
Ice cream gives me a stomach ache, but I eat it anyways. Ugh, not a good habit.

Bad habits rarely lead to a positive outcome.

If you go out drinking on a Friday night, Saturday is pretty much a wash and if you really over-served yourself, Sunday probably isn’t going to be a productive either. This is especially true as you get older and it takes much longer to recover after too many adult beverages. It’s no big deal to drink too much or eat some sweets sometimes. It’s when these things become bad habits that snowball in the wrong direction. It can happen quite fast. Next thing you know, you styed out too late one night and that lead to a whole week without training. One week turns into several and eventually you’ve been sitting on your butt for a month or three. Who wants to start then, right?

Poor Program Design

This one is completely avoidable, but a few things need to happen first.

Check your ego
Find a good strength coach or personal trainer
Use common sense

When it comes to exercise selection, there are hundreds of choices. So where do you start?

You need to start with a movement baseline. At our gym, Skill of Strength, we use the (FMS) functional movement screen. To make this very simple, we implement a traffic light approach when it comes to exercise selection.

Red light – avoid these exercises for now
Yellow light – you can implement these exercises, but slow down and use common sense (ask a coach for assistance!)
Green light – these exercises are currently appropriate for you

This common sense approach is a fantastic starting point when it comes to exercise selection.

Here are a few other considerations when it comes to exercise selection.

If you continue to injure.yourself on a specific exercise, you need to stop. For example, if you have back pain every time you deadlift, you need to stop deadlifting.
If you are limited from a mobility standpoint, avoid loading movements that challenge your limited mobility. Here’s a quick example, if you cannot lift your arm overhead due to poor shoulder mobility, military press is a bad exercise for you.
If you are new to strength training, avoid highly technical movements. Advanced exercises are completely unnecessary and if you’re brand new to training, trying to get right into something technical is pretty much an injury waiting to happen. If you are new to working out and your gym or personal trainer asks you to perform barbell snatches, immediately leave and call the gym police. I’ll give you their number.
Another consideration when it comes to program design is total volume. So you really need to do 100 Burpee‘s for time? It is a quarter mile of walking lunges really that necessary? Are those “tabata” back squats really that important?

If your workout sounds more like a dare than a smart training program, this is a pretty good indication that your program is rubbish.

Listen, if you’re constantly doing workouts like this and you’re wondering why you cannot travel without your hypervolt, stim unit and foam roller it’s time to change your approach. You don’t need another recovery tool. You need to stop chasing soreness and fatigue. If you want to be sore, I’d suggest smashing your shin on a trailer hitch. If you want to be tired, have a child.

Daily Posture

The human body is incredibly efficient. It’s ability to adapt can be both a blessing and a curse. A perfect example of this is the SAID principle. This stands for specific adaptation to imposed demands. In a nutshell, if you repeatedly perform a task, your body will adapt to that specific task. This is your body‘s response to keep you safe, but to also make you more efficient at whatever you are doing.

If you train with kettlebells, you will get calluses on your hands. This is your body saying “Hey, I see you’ve been using your hands a lot, let’s lay down some calluses to protect those hands.” I guess you could consider this a positive adaptation. My wife seems to… she loves her callused hands.

On the other hand, if you sit all day, your body will adapt accordingly to that. You will actually become more efficient at sitting. This normally looks like forward head posture, rounded shoulders and global spinal flexion. While this is great for sitting, it can create a host of orthopedic issues. Poor posture can result in neck pain, shoulder pain and back pain.

Plus, it might just make you tired and grumpy. When’s the last time you sat for five hours straight, stood up straight and said “I feel fantastic!” Probably never. Most likely, you felt stiff, achy and immobile. This is why it’s so important to pay attention to your daily habits and postures. If you are sitting for 8 to 10 hours a day, your body is adapting to that seated posture. If you think that 2 to 3 hours of working out per week is going to change this, you are sorely mistaken. Get up and move more throughout the day!

Training hard

Ah, finally a legitimate reason to talk about recovery tools.

I currently oversee strength and conditioning for 5 fighters in the UFC. These guys train 2-3 times per day. Training is legitimately a full-time job for them. There is nothing gentle about combat sports and muscle soreness, achy joints and accumulated fatigue are real things.

These athletes make a living via fighting and a healthy, well-performing body helps them earn a paycheck. Whether it’s hot yoga, saunas, massage or self care, these guys have earned the right to spend a bit more time on recovery. They might need a wide array of foam rollers while you just need one.

—

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying that various recovery strategies are useless or unwarranted. I don’t think UFC fighters are the only ones who need recovery tools. I use them with many of my clients as a matter of fact. What I am saying is that when it comes to staying pain-free, whether you are performing at a high level or not, there are tons of factors you should pay attention to. Some of the aches and pains you think stem from your training sessions might easily be remedied with some simple (not necessarily easy) changes to the habits in your every day life.

Take a look at the list above and see how you can make some a few changes that will allow you to move better, feel better and perform better. Recovery tools optional.