Active Recovery

           Today we are talking about Active Recovery which I believe is going to help alleviate that soreness that you are encountering in your workouts and is going to help give you overall improvements. As I mentioned in an earlier blog article, soreness is the result of micro-tearing of the muscles and the soreness you feel are the muscles knitting themselves back together. Remember, soreness is a good thing. It means that you are working hard and your muscles are growing.

            Now, my workout patterns are divided into four different muscle groupings with both an A and B workout. So, let’s take for instance the Chest & Back workout which is the focus of this particular pretend week of training. We are performing Chest & Back A on Monday, we will run through the other three workouts and then shift to Chest & Back B on Friday. The goal of these workouts is hypertrophy which means we are sticking with the plan of 10 reps (8 reps with surgical form and slight cheating to get those ninth and tenth reps).

           What I am suggesting is that two days after Workout A, you perform a number of “active recovery” reps to help alleviate the soreness that you are feeling. I want you to imagine the hypertrophy workout as heavy lifting with a goal of 100 reps for a muscle group. If this seems like a lot, keep in mind that by performing 3 set of 10 reps through flat bench, incline, and decline, you just achieved 90 reps. Add on flyes and some ancillary exercises and you are actually doing more than 100 reps. So, you have performed your Monday workout and you are satisfied with the results.

           Now allowing the muscles to rest is very important for growth but if we do a little active recovery, you are getting blood flowing back into those muscles and, like the alcoholics, you are getting a little hair of the dog that bit you. Reference back to your tracking that you did on Monday (see, tracking is important!), I want you to target muscle exercises at 60-70% of the weight you performed on Monday with a total goal of around 45 reps.

           If you did a Flat Bench Press of 100 pounds for 10 reps, now let’s get 70 pounds for 8 reps. You want enough weight to stimulate the muscles and get blood flowing back into them but you don’t want to over-train. If this seems like a lot of work to add into an already packed workout, consider this. If you only do 1 set of 8 reps in a flat, incline, and decline position, that gets you to 36 reps. Toss in some flyes or a few ancillary exercises and you are done. You are not racking weights and setting up for three sets at each position. It is one set, switch position, another set, and so on.  

           Now, on Monday, after resting up for the weekend, Active Recovery might not be as essential as the Active Recovery performed on Wednesday or Thursday. But a little more active stimulation of the muscles fibers on Monday (when energy levels should be highest) is never a bad thing.

           If you worked chest and back on Monday, include some active recovery reps on Wednesday. You could even do this as part of your warmup reps before you really get started. If you do Shoulders and Lats on Tuesday, do some active recovery on Thursday. Legs on Wednesday get active recovery on Friday. And so on and so forth down the line. By doing this, you will feel a lot better about conquering that soreness issue.