Do NOT Discount Recovery

Take your recovery habits as seriously as your exercise. If your sleep, nutrition or stress management is poor, the exercise adaptations you are seeking may be severely compromised.   

You do not need perfect or quote-on-quote optimal recovery habits to realize good recovery and training adaptations, but you should seek to at least achieve these 3 foundational pillars of quality recovery to reap the lion share of benefits.

1. Get enough quality sleep. Either use a sleep monitoring device like on smartwatches, or pay close attention to your state of restfulness when you wake up. If your sleep device is showing you consistently get little to no deep sleep, or you usually wake up tired after sleeping 7-9 hours, consider evaluating your sleep hygiene. Implementing a consistent sleep schedule, limiting caffeine intake to early in your day, and sleeping in a quiet, dark, cool space, can all have a tremendous impact on your sleep quality.

2. Eat the right amount of food. Depending on your training goals, you may be seeking to eat a calorie surplus, deficit, or maintenance. Whatever your goal is, ensure you are eating an adequate amount of food to enable the change that you are seeking. Further, incorporate enough protein and vegetables to ensure muscle development, healthy digestion, and sufficient micronutrient intake.

A good way to calculate your daily protein goal, measured in grams, is by taking your bodyweight in pounds and multiply it by 0.7 to 1.0. So, if you weigh 170lbs, a daily protein goal of 119g (170lbs x 0.7) to 170g (170lbs x 1.0) per day should be adequate. Importantly, if you are eating in a calorie deficit, I suggest aiming to eat towards the higher end of this calculation, using the 1.0 multiplier.

3. Keep Stress to a minimum. Stress is a very normal physiological response, but if you find yourself in a state of stressfulness often, this can be detrimental to not only your training recovery, but overall health in general. If possible, the removal of the source of your life stressors is best to reduce overall stress. But, I understand that sometimes this is not quite possible. If your job causes you a lot of stress, it is not necessarily easy to simply change jobs. In circumstances like this, using stress reducing techniques, like exercise (both resistance training and cardio), breath work, spending time in nature, reading, and doing creative arts, like drawing or painting, have all been proven to help alleviate stress.