Physical recovery is about adapting to stress by balancing your nervous system and managing muscle soreness, while recognizing individual differences and prioritizing consistent training by listening to your body
Every industry has their own set of buzz words, and depending on the industry, sometimes those buzz words leak into the mainstream. The word “recovery” has undeniably emerged as a buzz word in the health and wellness industry and is now part of everyday vernacular for people interested in maximizing their health. But sometimes when a word is over used, people forget its meaning and significance, and I think that might be happening with recovery.
Recovery has several meanings and some of them are broad, but in the context of physical exertion, the meaning is much more narrow. It is essentially the ability to overcome and successfully adapt to a physical stressor in two distinct areas:
- Your autonomic nervous system (ANS)
- Your tissue quality (soreness/stiffness in muscles and tendons)
Your ANS is governed by the balance between its two branches, the sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic branch is often referred to as the “fight or flight” response while the parasympathetic branch is often referred to as the “rest and digest” response.
Maintaining the push/pull balance between these two branches is critical to our ability to bounce back after training. The best ways to assess your ANS recovery is typically through heart rate-based metrics, such as resting heart (RHR) rate and heart rate variability (HRV), which are featured metrics of most wearables.
Many wearables also typically feature proprietary recovery scores, but in my experience you are better off using the raw data of your RHR, HRV and respiratory rate (RR) along with your overall mood as the best way to assess ANS recovery.
Another important element to mention about the recovery status of your ANS is that it factors in something known as allostatic load, which is effectively the total amount of stress you are under at any given time, including mental and emotional stress produced by work or social circumstances.
Your tissue quality recovery is often impacted by frequency and efficiency. For example, if you’ve become very efficient at a movement because it’s a pattern you perform frequently within a standard volume, you are less likely to become stiff and sore from that movement.
However, if you are doing a movement for the first time or for the first time in awhile, there is a good chance it will make you sore. Mild soreness and stiffness is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you take it as a cue not to train or play through it. Particularly if the soreness registers more than 5 on a 1-10 scale. In such a scenario, training might still be fine, but finding a lower intensity or lower impact alternative activity is recommended. You are often better served by taking it slower or taking a day of rest than trying to power through stiffness and soreness. You will likely find that you come back stronger and with more enthusiasm to work hard if you throttle things back in the interest of moving better in a day or two.
The tricky thing about recovery from physical stressors is that people have differing capacities for recovery. Which is a notion that is obvious enough but is something I’ve gained a greater appreciation for after reviewing genetic data and working with thousands of people in the gym over the last 25 years. What it often comes down to is listening to your body and recognizing that discretion is the better part of valor in the interest of maintaining the most important training variable of them all, consistency!
