Saturday, April 27, 2024

How To Recover From Fatigue After Exercise

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Are There Complications From Not Allowing Muscle Recovery Time

3 Ways to Recover From Muscle Fatigue with Dr. Matt Salzler | Tufts Medical Center

If you dont let your muscles recover between workouts, you put yourself at risk of getting injured.

Repeated stress from exercise causes small tears called microtears that lead to muscles feeling sore and inflamed. An accumulation of tears puts you at risk of developing torn muscles, also called muscle strains or pulled muscles.

Muscle strains can range from mildly uncomfortable to complete ruptures that may need surgery to repair. If youre not recovering fully, youll also likely notice your athletic performance decline over time.

Be Smart With Your Training

Youll feel less fatigued after a workout if you keep your training balanced. Doing high-intensity interval training every workout will increase the fatigue you feel after an exercise session. Doing vigorous workouts too often can also raise levels of stress hormones, like cortisol, that have a negative effect on your health and well-being. Alternate intense workouts with lighter ones and dont do intense workouts more than two or three times per week. Make sure youre getting at least seven hours of sleep each night for recovery and to keep cortisol in check. Sleep quality matters too, so avoid devices that emit blue light within two hours of bedtime.

Youll get the best results from your workouts if you keep them balanced. Your body adapts to training by becoming stronger and more resilient, but push it too far, and it puts your nervous system into sympathetic overdrive and raises cortisol. Monitor for signs that youre overreaching such as:

  • Increased heart rate when you wake up in the morning
  • Excessive fatigue
  • Difficulty concentrating or staying motivated
  • Elevated blood pressure
  • Loss of appetite
  • Excessive anxiety or feelings of depression

These are signs that your body isnt getting enough recovery time or youre pushing too hard. Use them as a warning sign to allow your body more time to recover between sessions.

Eat Something With Protein Post

Sensing a trend here? While protein helps your body do its repair work, eating something containing both carbohydrates and protein is a good idea immediately after exercise.

Consuming milk, yogurt, or a peanut butter sandwich within 2 hours after your workout can help your muscles recover and restore the glycogen theyve lost.

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Micronutrients And Exercise Fatigue

Micronutrients are often overlooked when it comes to recovery. Yet including optimal levels of vitamins, in order for proper biological function, is critical to avoid extreme fatigue. Low micronutrient and inadequate micronutrient intake is seen in all levels of athletes and is compounded by normal losses during periods of increased training. These types of deficiencies lead to decreased performance, fatigue, weakness, weakened immune response, overtraining, anemia, and many others. But more often than not, you wont realize youre deficient until its too late.

Do An Active Recovery

4 Quick Tips for Active Recovery After a CrossFit Workout

After doing an active cooldown, spend at least fifteen minutes doing an active recovery. Doing this will help your muscles recover, and that can help with post-workout fatigue. Do some static stretching to lengthen the muscles you just worked. If your muscles are tight after a workout, youll feel less energetic.

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You’re Not Hydrating Enough

Working out makes you sweat, which can feel good if you’re properly hydrated. However, if you’re not prepared for your workout and you lose too much fluid, you can become dehydrated.

Thirst isn’t the only symptom of dehydration, according to MedlinePlus. You might notice you’re actually sweating and urinating less, as your body attempts to preserve fluids. You could also get tired, feel dizzy, have a headache or experience a decrease in performance. In serious cases, you can be confused and even faint. Your heartbeat can become rapid or irregular, and it’s possible to go into shock, per MedlinePlus.

Heat complicates dehydration. Since your body uses sweat to cool off, exercising in a hot environment can make you lose fluids more rapidly. If you’re going to work out somewhere exceptionally warm, make sure to hydrate more than you usually would.

What Happens To Your Body During Exercise

When you exercise, the muscle fibers in your body start to break down. Damaged muscle cells release an enzyme called creatine kinase into the blood. The level of CK in your blood shows how much your muscles and skeletal system have been worked during exercise. How can you find out how much CK is in your blood? Sign up for InsideTracker to have CK measured in your blood analysis. If your blood levels of CK turn out to be high, you definitely need to pay close attention to what youre eating after a workout. If your blood levels of CK turn out to be high, you definitely need to pay close attention to what youre eating after a workout.

Lactic acid, which is attributed to post-workout muscle soreness, is another indicator of muscle damage. As a product of the breakdown of your bodys glycogen stores, it accumulates during short and intense periods of exercise. However, lactic acid can be used as an energy source for endurance athletes when their glycogen stores are depleted. You can find lactic acid in dairy, meat, and pickled vegetables.

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Training And Recovery Tips For Post

How Much Rest & Recovery Do We Need After Workout? Dr.Berg on Exercise

Reading Time: 6 minutes 26 seconds

Date: 2020-02-11T00:00:00-05:00

Think about your toughest workout: How many exercises did you do? How long did your workout last? Did you eat before the workout? Did you recover properly the same day and days after?

Most people, including fitness professionals like ourselves, sometimes overdo it. While we still understand the importance of training hard, we do not always make a conscious effort to properly balance training intensity and recovery time. To help our clients maximize their workouts and results we must teach them the best ways to recover.

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Is It Normal To Be Tired For Weeks After Surgery

Even minor surgery can cause fatigue, including exhaustion, severe and prolonged fatigue, and shortness of breath. One of the reasons for this is that anesthesia wears off more slowly in the elderly, causing them to become iller.

Cumulative And Circadian Fatigue

Long hours of work, intense physical activity, and stress are all factors that contribute to cumulative fatigue. The most common symptoms of Circadian fatigue are sleepiness during the evening and night.

What Causes Exercise Fatigue

The following issues may contribute to exercise fatigue. Improving these areas can minimize fatigue after exercise.

  • Dehydration – When you sweat, you lose water and electrolytes. Less than optimum levels of fluid and electrolytes lead to exhaustion during and after workouts and affects your physical and cognitive performance. Recommended daily amounts of water are thirteen glasses of water for men and nine glasses of water for women. When working out, you need about 2.5 extra glasses for each hour of exercise. Taking plain water is recommended, but if you work out for more than one hour, an electrolyte-rich sports drink is also necessaryto replace electrolytes lost in the sweat. Drinking water also helps flush out metabolic waste.
  • Diet – Your body needs fuel to complete daily tasks and exercise which comes from the food you eat. The food is broken down into glucose for use throughout the body. Any extra glucose is converted to glycogen which is stored in the liver and muscles. When you start working out, your body uses glucose first. When this is depleted, glycogen is converted back to glucose for energy supply and once your glycogen stores are used up,you will get exhaustion after exercise.
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    Exercise Improved Long Covid Symptoms

    Researchers found that exercise helped COVID-19 long-haulers improve on:

    • Exercise capacity

    They saw an improvement in fatigue by five points on the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy Fatigue Scale over a six-week period.

    It is a questionnaire we use to measure fatigue, Enya Daynes, PhD, MCSP, pulmonary rehabilitation and research physiotherapist at the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre, tells Verywell. Daynes explains that the questionnaire rates fatigue-related concerns on a scale from 0 to 52 points.

    Before the rehabilitation program, patients with long-term COVID had over 30 points. After the study, participants no longer experienced severe fatigue. So when we say we improved by five points, what we mean is that it came down five points,” Daynes says. “The higher the score, the worse their fatigue. Anything above 30 would be severe.”

    In addition, the study used a test known as the incremental shuttle walking test and found that participants improved by 112 meters. People increased their endurance by 544 seconds.

    However, she adds that exercise is not a one-size-fits-all solution and might not be a solution for everyone. If they want to try exercise, they should speak to their doctor or their physical therapist, or whoever is in charge of their care because there is going to be a small amount of readers that wont benefit, Daynes explains.

    Get More From Your Recovery Days

    Optimising Recovery After Exercise

    Rest and recovery is an essential part of any workout routine. Your after-exercise recovery routine has a big impact on your fitness gains and sports performance and allows you to train much more effectively. Unfortunately, most people don’t have an after exercise recovery plan. Here are some tips to get your post-workout plans on track.

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    When Should You Be Eating For Recovery

    How soon you eat after a workout definitely matters! No matter what time of the day you exercise, its important to eat a nutritious snack or meal that contains a combination of protein and carbohydrates. For fastest recovery, eat within an hour of finishing your workout. If you cant grab a snack right away, eat within two hours.

    The Importance Of Recovery

    Recovery after exercise is essential to muscle and tissue repair and strength building. This is even more critical after a heavy weight training session.

    A muscle needs anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to repair and rebuild, and working it again too soon simply leads to tissue breakdown instead of building.

    For weight training routines, this means that you should never work out the same muscle groups two days in a row.

    There are as many methods of recovery as there are athletes. The following are some of the most commonly recommended by the experts.

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    Know The Signs Of Muscle Fatigue

    Your body starts changing when you experience muscle fatigue, according to a 2015 paper in Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews. The chemicals released start a cascade of events that lead to changes in your behavior. During this sequence, toxic chemicals and free radicals penetrate your organ systems. They elevate your body temperature, and you become uncoordinated.

    Read more:What Causes Muscular Fatigue?

    Why Protein Is Important

    Tips for Faster Recovery After Exercise

    Post-workout recovery is essential for avoiding overtraining altogether. If nutritional and supplemental action is not taken after training sessions, youll be setting yourself up for failure from the get-go. Youll notice a gradual decline in performance and can lead directly to overtraining in as little as one week. We stand by the belief that protein source, even post-workout, should come from food first. The reason for this is simple its the most natural and nutritious source of protein.

    Ensuring adequate protein intake throughout the day is the next step you can take to elevate your performance and reduce exercise fatigue. Protein is necessary to repair exercise-induced muscle breakdown, maintain immune system function, and build more muscle mass.

    Some examples of inadequate dietary protein symptoms are:

    • Cessation of menstrual periods
    • Frequent colds and sore throats
    • Reduced and prolonged recovery times
    • Lack of and poor mental focus
    • Chronic exercise fatigue
    • Slow results regardless of high training level input

    An easy and convenient way to get more protein throughout the day, is to supplement using a whey protein isolate. Whey protein isolate helps flood the body with amino acids, which help rebuild muscle mass and improve recovery. Swolverine’s whey protein isolate contains 26g of grass-fed protein per serving. If you’re a vegan or need a plant-based option, check out our plant protein made with 5 plant superfoods.

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    Workout Fatigue: How To Identify It & Prevent It

    Sweat

    Have your muscles ever been so sore after a workout youve struggled to pull up your jeans or walk up the stairs? Perhaps your workout routine is leaving you feeling constantly tired? You might have been experiencing post-workout fatigue.

    When you train hard or start to move again after time off from exercise, its normal to sometimes feel a bit tired or encounter DOMS in the days after your workout. While normal bouts of tiredness may occur occasionally or last for short periods and DOMS should subside after a few days, significant fatigue can hang around for much longer and can even impact your health and day-to-day life.

    So how can you identify this fatigue? Heres everything you need to know.

    Accumulated Fatigue And Immune System

    When the body accumulates fatigue its defense systems become weak. Inflammation that takes place throughout the body and cortisol released in response to stress decrease the level of white blood cells, which promotes the growth of infections or viruses.

    Therefore, during periods of high training loads athletes are at much greater risk of catching a cold or developing an illness. If that happens, they lose the momentum and fall back on their training.

    Even one session at a wrong time can lead to illness and weeks away from training, so its better to stay cautious.

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    Signs Of Overtraining: How To Avoid Excess Fatigue And Ots

    Are you giving workouts your all but getting less in returnor even backsliding? Does it seem like youre always battling bronchitis, tendonitis, or another itis? Or maybe your usual over-the-top enthusiasm for workouts has faded to barely there.

    These are just a few possible signs of overtraining syndrome , and you dont have to be a competitive athlete to develop them.

    Here, well explore what OTS is, why it is so difficult to diagnose, the series of symptoms that can serve as warning signs, and some ways to help the body recover and return to former performance levels.

    *This blog will cover many aspects of overtraining, but to get the full story, the NASM CPT program can provide much more context.

    What Supplements Help With Muscle Fatigue

    Exercise &  Recovery From Prolonged Muscle Fatigue

    Many athletes swear by certain dietary supplements to support regeneration after workouts. Protein powders with essential amino acids and BCAA supplements are popular. The BCAAs can apparently activate enzymes that promote muscle growth, among other things. BCAAs are also involved in the regulation of blood sugar and are said to help counteract exhaustion during exercise and muscle fatigue.For most people, eating protein-rich foods during the recovery phase is good enough. Dietary supplements for athletes with amino acids or BCAAs can be worthwhile if you do very intensive sports or have a low-calorie diet, are on a vegan diet or vegetarian diet and do not manage to get enough protein in your diet.Supplements with essential amino acids are generally seen as a practical way to take in plenty of protein without adding too many calories.

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    When Should I See A Physician If I Am Experiencing Fatigue During Exercise

    Exercise fatigue syndrome affects a small number of people in the United States. Extreme fatigue or exhaustion after workouts may be caused by intense physical exertion or an underlying medical condition. If this becomes persistent such that you are always fatigued, it could signify a serious underlying condition that requires immediate medical attention.

    By: Terri Ahren, OTR/L

    Measure Post Workout Recovery By Listening To Your Body

    What we want to do to avoid accumulated fatigue and have consistent gains is to target complete post workout recovery and supercompensation in the training process. Not training load itself.

    There are lots of factors influencing recovery. Daily stress, past training, illness everything impacts how athletes feel.

    Instead of testing how you feel during the session its best to listen to the body and judge how well recovery is going. More often than not its better to switch training days to allow the body to achieve the optimal condition.

    Muscle soreness. Sore muscles mean the body is still healing micro traumas. Such muscles will not be able to operate at full capacity.

    Resting HR. A morning resting heart rate that is more than 4-5 beats above average will signal that the body is still dealing with stress.

    Blood pressure. Higher blood pressure means theres tension in the body.

    Sleep quality.More deep sleep promotes recovery, whereas tossing and turning does not allow the central nervous system to fully relax and allow the body to recover.

    HRV. A bit more advanced tactic is to use the Heart Rate Variability to test how recovery is going. Its a measure of the consistency between individual heart beats. The less consistent the beats , the less stress there is and the more recovered the body is.

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