Before you go on, try to reach one arm straight up. If your face did something dramatic, your ribs flared and your lower back arched, it is not a shoulder issue showing up, but three stiff joints trying to do a job for which none were recruited. Mobility training is meant to fill that void. … Read more
There is a sense of humor in the morning after a hard workout. You’ve had a good night’s sleep, you’re feeling morally upright and you sit down on the toilet to find your legs have officially complained. This pain, known as delayed onset muscle soreness, usually occurs 1 to 3 days after new or strenuous … Read more
Enter any gym at 6 a.m. and you’ll witness two religious rituals: people rushing past the stretching mat in its entirety, considering it a waste of their precious forty minutes, and people stretching cold before they’ve moved a muscle. Both are wrong. But the stretching research is so obvious that I can say this nicely. … Read more
Post Workout Recovery this is where people don’t take pictures of this part of training. It’s the actual adaptation that happens 24 hours after the training. The session was the stimulus and recuperation, when muscle is rebuilt, fitness banked and performance for the next week funded or foreclosed, was the response. Most people use this … Read more
There are two kinds of rest and only one of them is really restful. Passive rest. The couch. The series. The 6,000 steps that never were. Active recovery consists of walking, easy swimming, mild cycling, stretching, and other low-intensity exercise on the days your body is rebuilding. The surprising result is that it leaves you … Read more
Any supplement store’s recovery section will have a hundred bottles promising better mornings, faster muscle healing, sharper performance. The device that does all three is in your bedroom, which is underutilized between 11:30 p.m. to 6:15 a.m. Sleep is the period where the actual building work occurs, such as muscle repair, hormone release, nervous system … Read more
In gyms, physio offices and living rooms across the globe a cylinder of compressed foam that was once used for balance exercises is now being rolled with pained faces, usually while the roller begs the ceiling why they ever did leg day. This is one of the few healing products that has a strange story … Read more
Sauna Recovery is a special healing agent, you don’t need to make any effort. Heat. Silence. Twenty minutes of deliberately being warm in a wooden room. No foam, no compression, no failing at a stretch with a podcast explaining what’s wrong. But does the trained body really benefit from lying at oven-like temperatures or is … Read more
Hydration for Workouts there are two types of advice about hydration; both are incorrect. The first is the gallon-jug influencer who always has a tiny aquarium with them, as though the amount of water in them was a characteristic of their personality. The second is the stoic who sweats through sweltering afternoons, drinks when thirsty, … Read more
Recovery Day Workout there is a kind of guilt that comes with rest days. You’ve now developed the habit of training 3 or 4 days a week, and every fiber of your hard-won discipline wants to know who gave the go-ahead. People train their legs either lightly (five sets to failure) or they don’t take … Read more