The Role of Rest and Recovery in Fitness – Strategies for Optimal Performance

Every fitness session does small tears in your muscles, which need to recuperate to grow stronger and get you closer to your goals. Without the proper rest, you’re not getting any leaner.

What I’m essentially saying is that fatigue is not weakness, but it is the impulse to rest, a signal our bodies have been sending us since evolution, to help us fully develop, to allow us to accomplish our potential: to be humans. Embrace rest!

Sleep

Sleep is an important aspect of being fit, and athletes should make an effort to get at least 7-9 hours every night, as this will help with physical recovery, appetite regulation, muscle repair and growth, and far more.

And although small amounts of sleep loss generally aren’t going to negatively influence training performance, accumulating debts over time is extremely punishment on one’s mental and physical health, undermining workouts and performance as well as increasing injury risk.

Further, already fatigued athletes may suffer from slower reflexes and poor judgment, resulting in accidents from a workout or higher level of injury risk. Despite its association with passivity, we can now show that sleep is a highly active process, characterised by temporally separated sleeping and waking states and stages, and with evidenced recordings for such differences between both states, meeting sensory threshold requirements.

Nutrition

Of course, there are intensity and sweat-drenched workouts, but fuel remains an essential element of fitness – the right mix of carbohydrates, proteins and fats will help the body perform at its highest capacity, aiding in the recovery process.

The muscle fibres are damaged, and then your body would need a while to build them back up again after the workout. That’s when you get rest days, to recover and pump the muscles to be bigger and stronger.

And proper nutrition is important on days off as well. You don’t have to spend a day off on the sofa in front of the television, but active recovery such as walking or stretching combined with self massage using a foam roller could actually be more beneficial. You should drink fluids freely throughout the day to allow your body to perspire and eliminate the toxins through both sweat and urine, then rehydrate your body on a consistent basis for proper hydration. Proper hydration is an important part of your body’s metabolism and maintenance of body function.

Active Recovery

Active recovery differs from passive in that it recruits muscles in the task – which in turn increases blood flow hence more rapid recovery (efficiently reducing muscle soreness, and thus expediting the repair process). You might thus recuperate faster, regaining full activity quicker than if you had engaged merely in a passive recovery, and with a sharp boost in ‘bounce’ (heightened energy), and ‘snap’ (decreased muscle fatigue) in your stride.

The easiest way to incorporate active recovery is through walking, swimming or cycling at a lower intensity. Other methods, too, that improve mobility and combat imbalance in our patterns of movement, like the Alberta Kinesiologist Dean Somerset tells us: foam rolling, stretching and foam rolling. Talk at a good clip: allow for easy conversation but not easy-peasy conversation Says who? Umm, Dean?

Following every training session with an active recovery or on the days between high-intensity training can be a great strategy – but take regular total rest days because overtraining can also damage muscles and lead to overstrain.

Mindset

It contributes to fitness goals by encouraging, so a positive mindset should be developed because it will make it easier to be motivated, commit, achieve goals and overcome barriers when needed, in other words, to reach the potential a person is capable of achieving.

Fitness professionals and their clients must have good mindsets. A great way of starting this process is by self-educating on the types of distortions of thinking that hinder success. Magnification or Minimisation (when an event is seen as worse/better than the facts show) are just two of a myriad of kinds.

Goals that are clear, attainable, relevant and time-bound can help keep you moving towards their accomplishment, hopefully more quickly, and allow for celebrating success along the way. Practical and manageable goals also make tracking helpful, whether that be via cross-checking or simply creating a visual record such as a chart or calendar. It’s especially significant in building motivation to expand parameters by incrementally increasing fitness goals; creating realistic goals becomes a simple and invaluable way to maximise fitness practices both in and out of the gym.