No matter your level of fitness exercise should not just be about pushing your limits; it also needs to include allowing your body to recover and adapt. Recovery post-workout when done well reduces muscle soreness and lingering fatigue, helping you to engage in activity more regularly. Understanding the dynamics of exercise recovery and integrating effective nutritional strategies can significantly improve resilience and recovery post-workout.

Understanding Resilience and Recovery

The primary goal of exercise recovery is to alleviate muscle soreness and combat fatigue. During exercise, muscles endure stress and tiny tears, necessitating repair and remodeling for optimal growth and strength.

When thinking about the best ways to approach your gym routine, it’s important to have strategies in place to protect and improve our resilience as well as recovery. Resilience (in this case, to a physical challenge) refers to our ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from various physical stressors. We can improve our resilience and recovery by modifying our training intensity, duration, and frequency and focusing on specific nutrition and lifestyle habits.

Being mindful of how these modifiable behaviors impact our experience both at the gym and post-workout can make a big difference in the long run in shaping our fitness and overall health.

Consider Your Training Schedule

Exercise is a form of stress on our body. But not all stress is bad. When it’s healthy our body is equipped to recover from that stress and we give it enough time to return to a healthy baseline. When it’s unhealthy the stressor (aka exercise) that we expose our body to is too intense, too long, too frequent, and/or our body isn’t equipped to fully recover.

Signs of Overtraining:

• stress, anxiety, and/or depression
• trouble falling asleep or staying asleep
• fatigue
• brain fog, poor memory
• reactive hypotension (feeling lightheaded if you stand up too quickly)
• frequent illness
• strong sweet cravings
• caffeine dependency
• weight loss resistance
• low libido
• irregular or missing period
• frequent injury
• decreased strength or coordination
• poor workout recovery or excessive soreness

Exercise becomes overtraining when it’s no longer a positive stress on our body. How much exercise that is will vary person from to person, and can even vary depending on the day for the same person. To avoid overtraining, we must listen to our bodies and pay attention if we start to see any of the signs or symptoms listed above.

Even before we start to experience clinical manifestations of overtraining (like losing our menstrual cycle) it’s good practice to modify a training schedule based on your body’s capacity for stress.  Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a great metric that can help us understand how well the body is handling the current amount of stress that it is under.

• Higher Average HRV = well adapted
• Lower Average HRV = poorly adapted

Keys to higher HRV:

• Balanced activity levels
• Good nutrition
• Optimal hydration
• Quality sleep
• Low stress levels
• Balanced circadian rhythm

Read: Heart Rate Variability and Hair Loss 

To protect our resilience and improve our fitness and health over the long term, we need to avoid falling into the ‘no excuses’ gym mindset that tells us we shouldn’t listen to our intuition. A better approach to leveraging regular exercise to promote wellness is to reduce training load (workout intensity and/or frequency) when our body’s capacity for more stress is reduced. For example, if something is already stressing our body (e.g., lack of sleep) it’s important to acknowledge that an intense workout (aka physical stressor) may not be appropriate at that time. If we get in the habit of ignoring depleted resilience to stress, it can lead to more severe symptoms and even chronic health issues.

A helpful assessment tool for clients who want to gauge how their body has responded to stress over the long term is the DUTCH Test (Dried Urinary Test for Comprehensive Hormones). The test assesses adrenal function and since our adrenals are involved in our body’s stress response, it’s typical to see them negatively impacted in cases where someone has been neglecting resilience-building habits and over-stressing their bodies through exercise.

The DUTCH Test can provide valuable clinical insights that help me coach clients on modifying their nutrition and lifestyle habits to improve their resilience. Clients are frequently taken aback when they discover that restoring their health from this stage often necessitates significant alterations to their existing habits, sometimes even involving the avoidance of moderate and high-intensity exercise for extended periods. But these changes are usually essential to enhance their resilience gradually.

Please use the Contact form if you’d like to learn more about the DUTCH Test and inquire about pricing. 

Improving Resilience and Recovery with Nutrition and Lifestyle Habits

1. Increase Protein Intake:

My preferred method for determining whether a client is eating adequate protein is to ask my clients to share more about their regular food intake and to look for the signs that they are not eating enough.

If someone is not eating enough food, they are probably not getting enough protein either. When clients have low appetite, frequently skip meals, follow a strict diet, or avoid groups of foods I may suspect that they are under-eating and not getting enough protein for their body’s needs.

Read: 11 Causes of Decreased Appetite 

In addition to investigating my client’s nutritional habits, I also look for various signs and symptoms that may indicate they are not appropriately fueling their body. For example, frequent injury can be a sign of poor nutrition. Clinically, this is referred to as Low Energy Availability (LEA) and it occurs when energy intake is not enough to meet the energy needs of the body.

Under-eating is not uncommon and it’s something that I look for with each of the clients I support. A recent study found that 45% of female recreational exercisers are at risk of LEA.

Signs of LEA:

• Fatigue and Low Energy Levels
• Decreased Performance/Strength
• Recurring Injuries
• Changes in Menstrual Function
• Poor Recovery
• Decreased Bone Health
• Decreased Immune Function
• GI Issues
• Mood Disturbances
• Decreased Motivation
• Disordered Eating Patterns

So, eating enough protein starts with eating enough (period). It’s essential to resilience and recovery that we get optimal levels of protein to support muscle repair and recovery.

2. Boost Hydration:

Water is essential: Our bodies are composed of about 60% water, and every cell, tissue, and organ requires it to function properly. Staying hydrated is crucial for overall health and well-being. But beyond general wellness, proper hydration can also help support exercise performance, resilience, and recovery.

A general rule of thumb when it comes to water consumption is to drink roughly half of your body weight in ounces each day. So, if someone weighs 150lb, they may want to aim to drink 75oz of water each day. But it’s important to pay attention to your body to gauge how much water you need to stay optimally hydrated. Some symptoms of dehydration to watch out for are muscle cramps, fatigue, and brain fog.

Some people (especially athletes) may also benefit from replacing electrolytes lost through sweat. When we sweat, it can deplete levels of electrolytes such as sodium, chloride, and potassium.

Functions of Electrolytes:

• Fluid Balance: Electrolytes help regulate the balance of fluids in and out of cells.
• Nerve Function: They enable the transmission of electrical impulses, supporting nerve function.
• Muscle Contractions: Essential for muscle contractions and preventing cramps.
• pH Balance: Electrolytes contribute to maintaining the body’s acid-base balance.

3. Get Quality Sleep:

Sleep plays a critical role in supporting resilience and recovery and it’s one of the most underrated habits to improve performance and reduce sports injury. When we don’t get enough of the sleep our body needs, it can increase inflammation, disrupt hormone levels, and hinder protein synthesis.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night are considered sleep deprived. Here are the recommended amounts of sleep for adolescents and adults:

• Adolescents 8–10 hours
• Adults 7–9 hours
• Older adults 7–8 hours

Athletes (or anyone training like one), in particular, may require more sleep to support their training demands.

In case you’re still looking for more motivation to start prioritizing sleep: getting too little sleep may also increase your risk of getting injured. In one study, student-athletes who slept under 8.1 hours were nearly twice as likely to be injured compared with students who slept more than 8.1 hours. Another example of this is research that suggests that insomnia may increase risk of concussion and undermine injury recovery.

Read : 10 Strategies to Get a Great Night’s Sleep 

Enhancing exercise recovery and reducing sports injuries require a multifaceted approach encompassing nutrition, hydration, and sleep. By understanding the principles of recovery and implementing effective strategies, you can optimize your performance while safeguarding against injuries. Remember, optimal resilience and recovery is not a passive process but an active investment in your overall well-being and athletic success.