The 3 Best Recovery Practices

The highest-impact, lowest-effort methods to recover from your workouts.

Oct 07, 2024

Post summary

The recovery phase after your workout is when your body builds back better.
If you recover right, you’ll get fitter faster.
But the rise of the recovery industry has made us believe that recovery should be as time- and labor-intensive as the workout itself.
Recovery can and should be simple. In fact, simpler is more powerful.
In this post, you’ll learn:
- The top two recovery practices.
- Three other no-effort recovery practices that’ll help you recover better and faster.

Housekeeping

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But only Members get full access to Wednesday and Friday posts and their audio versions. Become a Member here:

ICYMI:
- On Wednesday, we covered the 10 ways to avoid microplastics (and not go crazy in the process). Think: 10 easy, powerful ways to reduce your exposure.
- On Friday, we ran an epic Burn the Ships workout that’ll help you improve and score your VO2, a figure highly correlated with longevity. The higher your VO2, the less likely you are to die at any moment.

Audio/podcast version

The post

We all know we need to exercise. But now, thanks to the rise of the recovery industry, we’re also told we need to devote ample time, resources, and effort to recovering from that exercise.

“Recovery” is big business. The market is growing about nine percent annually and is set to hit $13 billion by 2033. We’re inundated with recovery products and practices:

Watch our daily recovery score on an expensive fitness tracker (hi, Scarcity Loop).
Sit in an in-home cold plunge tub or sauna that cost about the same as a base-model Honda.
Take supplements upon supplements.
Wear recovery shoes (how these differ from regular shoes, I don’t know).
Get massages. Lots of them.
Do far-out ways of breathing.
Etc, etc, etc.

But in the words of the great American poet Sweet Brown, “ain’t nobody got time for that.”

Not me, anyway. Most of us have a hard enough time fitting the workout into our busy schedules—much less devoting even more time away from work and family to, like, breathe oddly while snacking on supplements as we sit in a tub of ice.

And so, I wondered, what are the lowest-effort ways to recover? I’m talking about practices that are basically a one on a 1-10 scale of efforts. Stuff busy people with busy work and family lives can do without interrupting the flow of their days.

So that’s what this post is about.

We’re covering three no-effort strategies that research suggests work.

Let’s roll …

Wait, what is recovery?

Before we begin, pause—what does recovery even mean?

There are three types of recovery:

Immediate recovery, which is recovering between rapid movements. This is the recovery that happens, for example, between reps when you a set of squats.
Short-term recovery, which is recovery that happens between bouts of exercises in the same workout, such as recovery between two different sets of an exercise.
Training recovery. This is recovery between workouts.

The third type is what we talk about when we talk about recovery.

One study defined this third type as: “(T)he time period between the end of a bout of exercise and the subsequent return to a resting or recovered state.”

So, basically: When we exercise, we toss a lot of stress at our body. But that stress, so long as we don’t go too far overboard and get injured, is a good thing. It sends a message to our body saying, “You might have to do this physical thing again, so you should build back better so you can do this physical thing even better next time.”

That process of building back better is how we improve and get fitter. The interstitial between the end of the workout and returning to normal or even better is the recovery period.

The point of all these recovery methods we hear of is to speed up the recovery phase so we can get back at it again and improve our fitness faster.

The top recovery methods

Despite everything we can do and buy in the name of recovery, the basics hit hardest.

If you don’t do these two critical things well, it won’t matter how many lines of magic recovery powder supplement you snort.

The two best things you can do to recover are:

Eat a good meal after your workout. It should have protein and carbs. Eat it within three hours of your workout; the closer to your workout, the better. Here’s why.
Get enough sleep. Sleep is individual, but most people do best with seven-ish hours.

If your nutrition and sleep are currently a dumpster fire, focus on fixing those before you worry about anything extra.

But if you sleep and eat like an adult, these three methods will help you build back faster.

Three no-effort recovery practices

1. Use a massage gun

I’m talking about those percussive guns that hammer into your muscles.

When massage guns first hit the market over a decade ago, they cost hundreds of dollars. Now you can get one at Costco for less than $100.

And they work. Researchers in the UK reviewed 13 different studies on massage guns. They concluded:

(M)assage guns can help improve acute muscle strength, explosive muscle strength and flexibility, and reduce experiences of musculoskeletal pain. These devices may provide a portable and cost-effective alternative to other forms of vibration and interventions.

Surprisingly, the guns worked better than sports massage and foam rolling.

2. Wear compression socks

I was skeptical that simply wearing tight socks could improve recovery.

But a good amount of research suggests compression socks help. For example, this one found they improved recovery markers and led to better subsequent running times in marathoners. Another meta-analysis found they helped with recovery from strength training and improved next-day cycling performance.

This graphic from researchers in the UK explains how they work.

By compressing your ankles and calves in key places, blood flow improves. This seems to improve recovery markers like soreness and creatine kinase levels (a marker of muscle damage), and help people regain strength and power quicker.

I’ve found the socks to be useful after long runs and rucks.

Anyway, if they help at all and the effort is … putting on a pair of socks … then I’m all for it.

No, the socks aren’t as cheap as the 75-pack of regular socks you can get at Costco for, like, $20. But their price is in line with any other “nice” sock.

Compression socks also good to wear on if you’re at risk of Deep Vein Thrombosis. A Cochrane review—the gold standard—found “There is high‐certainty evidence” that compression socks reduce the incidence of deep vein thrombosis.

Compression sleeves may also help golfers, tennis players, and more who experience elbow pain during their sport.

I like the socks from Pro Compression. They’re an OG leader in the field and do third party testing to make sure the socks meet the compression standards they’re after.

Get some here and use code ME40 for 40% off. I get no kickback from the brand. They were kind enough to give me a code to share.

3. Take a hot bath

It’ll help you recover more than a cold one.

One study compared taking a cold bath (51 degrees) to taking a hot bath (105 degrees) after a hard strength workout. The workout consisted of 7 sets of 10 leg exercises. So, yes, this workout was enough to cause some damage and soreness.

The results: The hot bath but not the cold one improved recovery of explosive strength and led to reduced muscle soreness.

The catch is that you can’t just dip in and dip out. You have to Ricky Gervais it: sit and marinate.

The participants sat in the hot bath for at least 20 minutes because their core temperatures had to get warm enough.

Once your body gets warm enough, it produces more heat shock proteins, which help cellular repair.

My guess is a sauna would do the same thing—the key is to just get warm for awhile. A hot shower, on the other hand, probably doesn’t get your body hot enough.

This all said, a cold bath can be good for short-term recovery. For example, if you had to compete two days in a row. But it seems to slow long-term recovery, making it suboptimal for most people over the long run. More on that here.

Have fun, don’t die, eat, sleep, recover doing nothing.

-Michael

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