Top 5 things to do after a workout
Whether you want to burn fat or build muscle, your workout is just one piece of the puzzle. There are a few things you'll definitely want to do after your workout to maximize recovery and speed up your progress. This can range from eating certain foods and taking specific supplements. All the ways to manipulate your body temperature to increase recovery and strength. So I'm going to end all of that today.
1) Do contrast therapy after a workout
Getting started with one of my personal favorite things to do after any workout, and that's contrast therapy. In a fascinating study, researchers compared contrast therapy with cold water immersion, hot water immersion, passive recovery stretching, and active recovery. Essentially you will expose a limb or your whole body to a hot temperature for a period of time. Then you will immediately expose it to a cold temperature for a period of time, and you repeat the process several times.
The easiest way to do contrast therapy that anyone can do, starting today, is to switch between a very cold and a hot bath. You can switch back and forth, doing one minute of each for a total of 10 minutes. However, my personal favorite way to do this is by using a sauna in conjunction with an ice dip. You'll get your body really warm in the sauna by staying there for at least a few minutes, and then once you're hot, you'll jump into a plunge of ice that's basically cold water. Now, if you don't have access to an ice plunge, you can do something similar by using a sauna at your gym and then immediately taking a cold shower for at least a minute and then further for a few rounds- it can be behind. On the other hand, if you want to try a dip in the snow, you can find one of the most traditional Russian and Korean bathhouses.
2) Tart Cherry Juice
The next thing you would want to do post-workout is to take some sports drinks like vitamin water and drink some tart cherry juice instead, as it is especially great in reducing post-workout muscle soreness. Several studies show that consuming tart cherries after resistance training reduces muscle protein breakdown and muscle soreness while speeding up the rate of recovery. One of these studies specifically focused on singular exercises for those of you who don't know. So this study was fascinating because it aimed to determine whether consumption of tart cherries before and after eccentric exercise would have a protective effect on symptoms of muscle damage. So they asked college.
Students to drink either 12 ounces of the tart cherry juice mixture or a placebo twice a day, once in the morning and once at night for eight straight days. The scientists found that the placebo group had a 30 percent loss of strength even 24 hours after the eccentric exercise. Even after 96 hours, they had a 12% reduction in strength in the muscles targeted with the exercise. On the other hand, the group that took the tart cherry juice instead of the placebo experienced only a 12% strength loss after 24 hours, and they actually had a strong gain of six percent from baseline after 96 hours. So, in other words, tart cherry juice reduces their post-workout strength loss and helps them recover faster. Tart cherries provide these benefits because they contain special flavonoids and anthocyanins, a group of substances that have antioxidant effects on the body.
3) Active Healing
The next thing I highly recommend you do after the gym if you're trying to reduce muscle soreness is active recovery, while you may not feel like doing anything after your workout. Not only is staying active more beneficial for your overall health and well-being, but it also helps you recover faster from your gym session. We have many studies proving this. For example, a study on cyclists found that active recovery removed lactic acid buildup in the muscles, helping cyclists to recover faster. In another study, 26 athletes did high-intensity workouts for four weeks and were divided into two groups. One group engaged in passive recovery at the end of each of their workouts which basically means they just rested. Meanwhile, the other group actively recovered, including 15 minutes of jogging at a moderate pace after their workout. At the end of four weeks, both groups had a similar increase in cardiovascular endurance. Nevertheless, the active recovery group also increased their anaerobic lactate threshold, the amount of intense physical activity they performed without increasing blood lactate levels.
Essentially this means that the active recovery group was also able to increase their work efficiency, and they did so without harming other aspects of their performance. In other words, this study shows us that doing cardio during your break or after a workout can benefit recovery and performance. However, it is important to keep the intensity low. It's a little shouldn't be a workout; instead, a very slow jog or jog is enough to reap the benefits without detrimental effect on your strength and performance.
4) foam rolling
Foam rolling is another great way to ease muscle soreness after a thorough workout. One study found that after performing several sets and reps of deadlifts that foam rolled their hamstrings, there was significantly less muscle soreness in the latter days than athletes who did not foam roll.
One possible reason that foam rolling may help reduce muscle soreness is because it helps stimulate blood flow to the areas you target. This increased blood flow is believed to help deliver nutrients to the muscle tissue. Research also indicates that foam rolling increases the activity of the parasynthetic nervous system as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for high-stress fight-or-flight situations. The parasympathetic nervous system is the system that is responsible for things like rest and digestion. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, your body is put into greater recovery mode. So if you want to add some foam rolling after your workout, you'll slowly roll over the muscles you want to target, and if you find any tender spots, you'll spend 20 to 30 seconds before moving on. I will hold those places till then.
5) Creatine
Next is creatine, and if you want to have something after your workout to help promote muscle growth, creatine should definitely be on that list, and most of you already know that a lot of studies. Show that creatine is excellent at improving strength and muscle growth. But what most of you don't know is that creatine also reduces the damage and pain caused by exercise, as shown in a study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology.
Hence it is a great post-workout recovery supplement. Research indicates that creatine improves body composition and athletic performance after exercise than after exercise. For example, in one meta-analysis, researchers concluded that creatine supplementation immediately after resistance training was better at increasing muscle mass than creatine supplementation immediately before resistance training. So you might consider taking creatine after your workout, and if you choose, you only need 5 grams of creatine monohydrate per day to see benefits.
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