I had a friend who went from competitive swimming and weight training to wanting to run a marathon. The muscles that you needed to hone for each of them were a little different. When he started training for a marathon he noticed how sore his legs were and how difficult it was to start up again for the next session.
There are physiological changes within the muscle groups that you train hard. Muscle damage from micro tears occur as you use up a muscle over and over. Inflammation sets in as an acute response to the damage you incur as well. Not only that, but there’s the idea of “perceived fatigue”, which is basically how tired you think you are regardless of whether it’s true. It can happen at some point after your workout, whether it’s an hour after or a day after.
I’m sure everyone can relate to this on a good leg day. Especially stairs. They’re a nightmare the day or two after. The thing is, that friend of mine toiled session after session trying to increase his endurance and speed, whilst simultaneously reducing his recovery sessions. It was difficult for him since he didn’t do any post-exercise recovery techniques, other than stretching which doesn’t work well, if at all. Now had he known of active recovery, massage, or cold-water immersion, using compression socks/sleeves or whatever else; would it have made a difference? The answer was surprising for me, but it made sense, and made me quite content. A meta analysis of 99 research studies, with over 1000 research participants in these studies was conducted. [1] They looked at all different types of post-exercise recovery techniques like:
Active Recovery
- Stretching
- Massage
- Massage + Stretching
- Electrostimulation
- Compression garments
- Immersion Contrast
- Water Therapy
- Cryotherapy
- Hyperbaric Therapy
I think most of use use at least one or two of these to help with the fatigue, soreness and feelings of inflammation after a good workout.
There’s just no way I could do it. Too cold. I’m Canadian, but still. Can’t do it. The criteria they used to determine which one worked better was off of scoring of Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness (DOMs), Perceived fatigue, inflammatory and muscle damage markers.
Lower levels of markers for inflammation (Interleukin-6, C-reactive Protein) and muscle damage (creatine kinase) give a better score. Perceived fatigue and DOMs were measured based off of interviewing participants and recording their responses.
What they found was interesting.
For DOMs, active recovery, compression garments, immersion, contrast water therapy, cryotherapy and massage were the most effective. Nothing else really worked.
For DOMs and fatigue, massage was considered the best technique to use. For inflammation, cold exposure (of course) and massage were considered the most powerful techniques. The takeaway from this study is to probably get a massage! It works better if you have someone else do it for you (so you can actually relax instead of trying to work yourself death to relieve your pain) but you could foam roll, use a massage gun or what not at the very least.
Utilizing all of the post-exercise techniques in the world is time consuming and some might not work for you, but choosing the ones YOU find help YOU will. If massage makes you uncomfortable, or you feel like it doesn’t help, then don’t use it. If you feel like an ice-bath does wonders for you, then do it! At the end of the day, these post-exercise techniques for recovery definitely have a lot of evidence to back up their usefulness, but at the end of the day it comes down to our own perception of what works for us.
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