Recover: What's active recovery?
What to do on an active recovery day
What are active recovery activities?
Activities for an active recovery day are those that activate your parasympathetic nervous system: the rest and recovery branch of your nervous system.
That means activities that:
Are low intensity
Are low impact
Include varied and wide-ranging movement patterns
Mildly increase heart rate
ome more common examples of activities are:
yoga or pilates
swimming
an easy swim or bike ride
a post-dinner walk
gentle hiking, through the urban sidewalks or countryside
playing frisbee with your dog
soft tissue work like foam rolling or massage
connecting with friends and family, laughing, and playing
anything else that gets you moving and brings some joy to your day
Whatever activity you choose, the purpose of an active recovery day is to not increase workout capacity.
In other words, don’t push harder or longer relative to what you’ve been doing in workouts over the last two weeks.
How do you know if you need a recovery day (or more)?
If you’re generally following your workout program’s schedule of weekly workouts, you’ll be working out about 3-5 days per week. On a typical week, you’ll have about 50% active training days, and 50% active recovery days.
The starting guideline for balancing training stress and recovery is to start by taking at least 1 active recovery day after every challenging workout day.
Those are general guidelines. If you’d like to make your program more personalized to you and your specific lifestyle and goals, listen to your body.
Every individual’s body is unique: they’ll feel stress differently and recover from stress at different rates. Ultimately, only you can know your unique stress and recovery signals. Those are the signs that tell you when you can push harder and when it’s smarter to do less.
Soreness check
When you’re moving your body in new ways and with increased loads, your muscles will feel sore in the 1-3 days following your workout. That’s normal and expected.
You can continue to strength train during moderate muscle soreness.
Pay attention to your patterns of muscle soreness.
As your body becomes more accustomed to moving and lifting, the duration and intensity of the soreness should decrease. Your body is making deep structural adaptations, and you’re getting fitter. Solid.
Below are some more common key body signals that guide whether you need more or less recovery.
Fatigue can be felt both physically and psychologically.
Fatigue feels like:
“Heavy” movement (e.g., feeling physically weighted-down, with a body that feels harder to move. Walking or running might feel like slogging through mud rather than snappy and weightless.)
Difficulty maintaining strong posture and form
Brain fog or slow thinking
Uncertainty and indecisiveness (difficulty making decisions or deciding what to do next)
Slow and delayed movement (rather than quick and snappy movement)
Feeling tired, depressed energy, and or depressed mood
A vague sensation of feeling “off”, or somehow not quite right
Disrupted sleep
More intense cravings, especially for refined carbs (sugar and sweets) or high-fat foods
Decreased sex drive
Getting sick often, or illness that lingers
To contrast, being fully recovered without fatigue feels like:
being mentally clear and alert
feeling energy and motivation to move
feeling “on”, and banging on all cylinders
Remember that all stress is cumulative.
If you've had greater stress in other areas of your life recently (other than physically working out), your need for total recovery will be affected.
Regardless of the source of stress, all stressors act on the same central nervous system and brain. That same brain creates your experience of either stress and fatigue or recovery and vitality.
No matter the source of stress, responding to stress with adequate recovery is necessary to make you physically, mentally, and emotionally stronger.
