Performance Recovery

*Updated 4/19/18
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If you’re training hard in the gym and have your nutritional habits dialed in but are still hitting frustrating and fatiguing plateaus, chances are you don’t have a programming problem, or even a nutritional problem for that matter.

While it’s easy to blame poor performances and shoddy results on your training split or macro breakdowns, there’s another big pink elephant in the room that even the most elite strength athletes tend to overlook when it comes to human performance, and that’s recovery. 

In todays highly stressed out, sleep deprived and over trained physical culture, recovery is truly the bottleneck that is placing a broad scope glass ceiling over your power, strength and physique goals. As it’s been famously quoted, for 99.9% of the people in the world, over training is a myth, but under recovering, that’s the problem.

Contrary to popular belief, recovery is NOT a passive process. The days of sitting on your ass and waiting for DOMS to magically dissipate are gone. If you’re serious about making gains in the shortest time possible, it’s about time you start prioritizing your recovery.

Here’s the 5-step recovery system that can be tacked onto the end of a training session as a cool down, used as an evening secondary recovery workout 4-6 hours a heavy lift, or as a stand alone recovery day to spark the recovery process.

While soft tissue techniques have been a popular tool to enhance mobility and movement quality in the pre-training routine, they are also highly effective for expediting the recovery process when properly utilized.

Global soft tissue techniques differentiate themselves from their pre-training counterparts in the actual execution of the modality and the focused goal and intent while on the foam roller. Global foam rolling incorporates longer “passes” of the body over the roller anywhere from 6-12 inches of relative movement in order to more completely course a muscle. These passes are predominantly pressured in a distal to proximal direction (back up towards midline of body).

This longer pass is directed over big primary mover muscles in the body such as the quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, calves, pecs, and lats as these muscles that have the most surface area available for the roller to contact.

By rolling big primary muscles more completely, we can aid in reducing the sympathetic CNS response that was heightened from training while helping to mobilize lymphatic fluid that has pooled in active musculature back up into central circulation to be excreted from the body.

Focus 2-3 minutes on each key muscle that was an active player in the training session of the day (or previous day) and incorporate a relaxing deep diaphragmatic breathe during these strategies to allow for a greater parasympathetic response.

Over the years, I’ve seen that as stand alone recovery tools, both foam rolling and stretching are extremely limited. That’s why we group them together as a functioning unit in the 5-step recovery system.

Allowing the sympathetic response to be blunted via the foam roller before positioning the body to achieve a stretch can be hugely advantageous for not “fighting” yourself in order to elicit a stretched response in targeted tissues.

The goal is to be able to control your own body and actively position it in such a way to achieve an internal stretch that is both joint friendly (aka no nasty joint stress or compensation patterns) and effective for functional carryover into more meaningful activities like compound movements.

Using a co-contraction and pre-tension technique around the hips and shoulders, we can maintain neutral spinal positions while torqueing down the pillar complex in order to achieve the desired stretch. Once the position is optimized, slight micro-movements will be added to the position to once again allow the body to relax and respond favorable to the new positions.

Oscillate on and off of the keystone stretched position for 1-2 minutes once again using a deep diaphragmatic breathe throughout, and then hold a NON-compensated end range stretch for an additional 1-2 minutes.

The key areas to hone in on for recovery based bi-phasic stretching will be very similar to the global foam rolling list; quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, calves, pecs, and lats. As these stretches are more long duration positional holds, ensure your entire body is actively stabilized and NOT going passive at any point.

No matter if you are a high performance athlete whose profession is their sport, or just an average person with general fitness and aesthetics goals, you’re most likely in need of some postural support and correction via mobility and movement drills.

While intelligently designed and pristinely executed strength and conditioning programming will serve as a long term maintenance plan for mobility and movement capacity, there are certain regions and patterns that deserve more focused volume in the form of re-training.

This flow based mobility sequence calls for 5-10 minutes of mindful movement practice linking together a couple corrective exercises or flow based routines (constant movement putting many joints through full range of motion on repeat) to once again negate the ill effects of our highly sedentary daily postures.

Two key regions that I’ve found a vast majority of people are in need of more focused volume on are the hip flexors and the thoracic spine/cage. These two regions are chronically shortened and “flexed” in positions such as sitting, and can compound over time to negatively affect movement pattern quality or even elicit pain responses.

Prioritizing a movement flow sequence that allows the body to move the thoracic spine/cage into coupled extension, rotation and side bending while also moving the hips into extension would be my recommendation if you sit more than 5-6 hours a day, which qualifies 90% of people from athletes to desk jockeys.

The goal here is to be smooth, sequenced and stable. When in doubt, move slower and more deliberately in order to enhance the quality of whatever movements you place together in this recovery phase.

While there’s nothing too sexy about recovery zone steady state cardio tacked on to the tail end of an otherwise hardcore training day, the results will prove king and have you progressing faster when incorporated properly into a well rounded recovery session.

Choosing activities that keep your heart rate low enough to allow for base cardiorespiratory function to be improved while avoiding spiking it too high and further fatiguing your mechanical and neurological systems is the key.

Graded inclined treadmill walking, the elliptical and biking are all great options here as you can manipulate the position of the machines, the speed or the resistance in order to achieve and maintain the desired heart rate with continuous monitoring.

While the bike and elliptical area great to work energy systems in a low impact state, the most superior option here is walking, as the reciprocal gait cycle has some added orthopedic resiliency benefits that can combat lower back pain and alleviate chronic hip, back and even shoulder tightness.

If you are using this directly after training, keep your LIISS cardio durations under 15 minutes. As a secondary recovery workout, you can extend this out to 25 minutes. And finally, if you are using this method as a stand along recovery day, feel free to increase duration up to 45-60 minutes, once again monitoring heart rate to ensure we are enhancing recovery, and not taking away from it.

Positional parasympathetic breathing has become a staple in nearly all of my athlete’s programs due to its almost instantaneous positive results. As the last step in the 5-step recovery system process, we are positioning our athletes into a supine position with the legs elevated and having them do one simple thing, breathe.

Elevating the legs up on a box or weight bench not only allows for gravity to be used to our advantage to help reduce the pooling of lymphatic fluid in the feet, ankles, lower legs and thighs, but also places the spine in a supported neutral position where much of the fluid from the legs will end up redistributing.

The eyes should be closed and the space should be quiet to reap every benefit from this practice. If you are in a commercial gym, drag a box over into the foam rolling station and throw in your ear buds with relaxing music. While there are many ways to enhance parasympathetic (rest and recover) responses, supporting the body in a passive position while minimizing visual and auditory inputs are some of the easiest and most powerful.

The last focus will be to focus in on the breath itself. Using a deep inhale, a hold at the top, and a long extended exhale, the goal is to slow the breath in order to transfer into the reduction of blood pressure, respiratory rate and other vital metrics. Expand through your belly, and finish off the top of the breaths with expansion through the chest as well. Stay in this position for as long as you need, as you can never over train proper breathing patterns.