All About: Rest and Recovery

Rest and recovery are essential to your strength training routine. This is the time where your muscles are really at work and are growing and adapting to your training. It can be tough to really know when to rest if you are feeling super motivated to workout, but you have to, to see change! 

How do you know you need to rest?

Constantly tired?
Always Sore?
Feel like you’re hitting a plateau?
Not progressing in a workout program?
Appetite is sporadic?
Craving sweets?

If any of these resonate with you, it might be an indicator that you are in need of some rest and recovery! Listen to your body, it will tell you what it needs!

What does recovery look like?

How many hours of sleep should you be getting each night? How much water should you be consuming daily? What do your stress levels look like? These are the fundamentals that you need to focus on first before diving into other things such as protein, carbs, fats, supplements, etc. for recovery.

Generally, you should be getting 7+ hours of sleep each night. Although you are asleep, your body’s working overtime! During sleep, your body restores energy, repairs cells and releases hormones and proteins. On top of that, your brain stores new info and rids itself of toxic waste, how cool! Secondly, according to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, you should be drinking about 11.5 cups, or 2.7 liters, of water or fluids daily. Lastly, stress can really take a toll on your body, so managing that stress is essential to recovery! Check out our list below for some ways we like to rest and recover.

Ways to recover

Rest and recovery look different for everyone. Here are some of the ways we like to rest and recharge:

• Travel
• Play volleyball or another sport
• Hang with family
• Go outside and take a walk
• Sleep in (seriously!)
• Meet friends for dinner and drinks
• Watch your favorite tv show or movie
• Go to festivals (there are plenty in Wilmington!)
• Read

We always make sure to talk about rest and recovery and build it into our workout schedules. If you need help with this make sure to follow us on Instagram for more tips, and contact us to work on your health journey!