Whether you want to burn fat or build muscle, your workout is just one piece of the puzzle. You'll definitely want to do certain things after your workout to maximize recovery and speed up your progress. This can range from eating certain foods and taking specific supplements. All the way to manipulating your body temperature to boost recovery and strength. So I'm going to go over all that today.
Contrast Therapy
Starting first with one of my personal favorite things to do after any workout, and that's contrast therapy. Researchers compared contrast therapy to cold water immersion, hot water immersion, passive recovery stretching, and active recovery in a fascinating study. Essentially you would expose a limb or your entire body to a hot temperature for a period of time, and then you would immediately expose it to a freezing temperature for a period of time, and you would repeat this process several times.,
Keep in mind all these things are believed to be helpful with reducing soreness and speeding up recovery. Still, researchers found that contrast therapy led to greater improvements in muscle soreness and post-recovery strength levels than every other recovery method. IT also reduced muscle inflammation. IT improved mobility, and it also improved muscle range of motion significantly. This means that contrast therapy can help you recover from workouts faster than almost any other method.
Now the easiest way to perform contrast therapy that anyone can do, starting today is by switching between a very cold and hot shower. You can switch back and forth, doing a minute of each for a total of 10 minutes. However my personal favorite way to do this is by using a sauna, in combination with an ice plunge. You would get your body really warmed up in a sauna by staying in there for at least a few minutes and then once you're really warm, you would jump into the ice plunge which is basically freezing cold water. NOW, if you don't have access to an ice plunge you could do something similar by using the sauna at your gym and then immediately taking a cold shower for at least a minute and then going back and forth for a few rounds. If, on the other hand, you do want to try an ice plunge, you could find one in most traditional Russian and Korean bathhouses.
The tart cherry juice
The next thing you'll want to do after a workout is to have some sports drink like vitamin water and drink some tart cherry juice instead because it's specifically great at reducing post-workout muscle soreness. Multiple studies show that consuming tart cherry after resistance training reduces muscle protein breakdown and muscle soreness while speeding up the rate of recovery. One of these studies was specifically focused on eccentric exercise for those of you, that don't know.
The eccentric portion of an exercise is when you extend and elongate the muscle instead of the concentric portion, which is when you contract and shorten the muscle. So for example, with exercises like the bench press, bicep curls and with squats, the eccentric portion would be when you're lowering the weight down. However, both concentric and eccentric ranges of motion will break down muscle tissue. The eccentric portion is believed to do the most muscle damage in the form of microscopic tears.
So this study was especially interesting because it aimed to find out if tart cherry consumption before and after eccentric exercise would have a protective effect on muscle damage symptoms. So they set up the experiment by having college students either drink 12 ounces of a tart cherry juice blend or a placebo twice a day, once in the morning and once at night for eight days straight. The scientists found that the placebo group still had a strength loss of 30 percent even 24 hours after they finished the eccentric exercise. After 96 hours, they still had a 12% reduction in strength in the muscles targeted with the exercises.
On the other hand the group taking the tart cherry juice instead of the placebo only experienced the 12% strength loss after 24 hours and after 96 hours they actually had a six percent strength gain above baseline. So in other words, the tart cherry juice reduce strength losses after their workout and help them recover faster. Tartt cherries provide these benefits because they contain special flavonoids and anthocyanin,s which are a group of substances that have antioxidant effects in the body.
Active recovery
The next thing that I highly recommend you do after the gym if you're trying to reduce muscle soreness is active recovery, while you might not feel like doing anything after your workout. It's much more beneficial to stay active not only for your overall health and well-being but also helps you recover from your gym session faster. We have several studies proving this.
For example, one study on cyclists found that active recovery removed lactic acid buildup in the muscles, helping the cyclists recover faster. In another study, 26 athletes performed high intensity workouts for four weeks and they were split 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 stuck to active recovery, which would consist of 15 minutes of jogging at a moderate pace after their workouts. At the end of the four weeks, both groups had similar increases in their cardiovascular endurance. Still, the active recovery group also increased their anaerobic lactate threshold, which is the amount of intense physical activity they could do without a rise in blood lactate levels.
Essentially this means that the active recovery group was also able to increase their work capacity, and they did that without harming other aspects of their performance. In other words this study shows us that, doing like cardio on your off days or after a workout can help benefit recovery and performance. It's important, however, to keep the intensity low. It should not be a mini workout, instead a very slow jog or a walk is enough to reap the benefits without having detrimental effects on your strength and performance.
Foam Rolling
Another excellent way to reduce muscle soreness after you're fully done working out is, by foam rolling. A study found that athletes that foam rolled their hamstrings after performing multiple sets and reps of deadlifts experienced significantly less muscle soreness during the following days when compared to the athletes that didn't foam roll at all.
One potential reason why foam rolling can help reduce muscle soreness is due to the fact that it helps stimulate blood flow to the areas that 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 unlike the sympathetic nervous system which is responsible for high stress fight or flight situations.
The parasympathetic nervous system is the system that's responsible for things like rest and digestion. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, your body is placed into more of a recovery mode. So if you want to add some foam rolling after your workouts, you would simply slowly roll over the muscles you want to target, and if you find any tender spots, you will hold those spots for 20 to 30 seconds before moving on.
Creatine
Next is creatine and if you're looking for something to take after your workout to help boost muscle growth, creatine should definitely be on that list and most of you already know that there are plenty of studies showing that creatine is excellent at improving strength power and muscle growth. But what most of you don't know is that creatine also reduces exercise-induced damage and soreness, shown by study published in the European Journal of applied physiology.
That's why it's a great post-workout recovery supplement. Research indicates that creatine is more effective for improving body composition and athletic performance when taken after exercise instead of before exercise. For example, in a meta-analysis, the researchers concluded that creatine supplementation immediately after resistance training was better at increasing muscle mass when compared to creatine supplementation immediately before resistance training. So you may want to consider taking creatine after your workout and if you choose, you only need about 5 grams of creatine monohydrate per day to see the benefits.
Get protein after the workout.
You definitely want to ensure that you get some form of protein post-workout because protein is the most important macronutrient to consume after exercise. After all, it's essential for producing a positive muscle protein turnover rate. A positive protein turnover rate refers to a state where more proteins get built up in a muscle than the amount that gets broken down. When that happens, a muscle grows in size.
According to a 2016 paper, only 20 grams of a high-quality protein source like whey is enough to produce a significant protein synthesis response after a workout. However, the researchers also found that increasing whey protein to 40 grams also increased muscle protein synthesis by another 20 percent. So, for maximum muscle-building benefits, you might want to aim closer to 40 grams of a high-quality protein source post-workout. Keep in mind that the anabolic window doesn't exist.
So, if you already had some form of protein a couple hours before your workout, it isn't that important to quickly consume a fast-acting protein source. In fact, slower digesting protein sources like casein cheese or meat would be totally fine as well. Still, if you train fasted or you didn't have any protein within two to three hours before your workout, then you would be better off trying to take in a protein source sooner rather than later or at least going with a faster digesting protein source post-workout like whey protein.
Get Enough Dehydrated
NOW other than taking in creatine and protein you're also going to want to ensure that you hydrate after your workout. Replenishing the water that you lost through sweat is not only essential for your health, but it's also crucial if you want to see results. That's because dehydration prevents muscle growth by lowering muscle protein synthesis rates while raising muscle protein breakdown rates and it does make a lot of sense that staying hydrated is crucial for muscle growth.
Since your muscles are made up of about 79% of water, it also lines up with other studies that showed just a five percent dehydration rate significantly reduced testosterone production after weight training while increasing cortisol and norepinephrine.
This is bad because testosterone is involved in muscle protein synthesis, while cortisol and norepinephrine act catabolic, which means they increase muscle protein breakdown. So make sure to drink enough water after your workout. Just by simply downing one or two glasses of water after your workout, you can ensure that you stay pretty well hydrated.
Get Shower and Change Clothes
Finally, last but not least, this one is more or less common sense. You definitely should shower and change your clothes after a workout. NOW i know, you probably want to take it easy and rest after a hard workout but you shouldn't spend too much time lingering around in your sweaty clothes.
If you don't shower and change your clothes, continuing to wear your gym clothes can cause fungal and bacterial infections, and on top of that, not showering post-workout can cause acne that's because it increases the likelihood that an oily substance known as sebum along with dead skin cells will clog your hair follicles leading to acne. So do your best to take a shower, especially after workouts that make you sweat a lot.
So those are eight things that you should consider doing after your workouts.
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