Get Better Results with Active Recovery

One aspect of fitness that tends to get forgotten is Active Recovery. This is the stuff that helps your body to recover fully, get you the most out of your workouts, and keep your body feeling great. Everyones natural instinct is to push harder with their exercise and workouts, but results are actually driven by the quality of your recovery.

So what is Active Recovery? It's foam rolling, stretching, and even some movement prep exercise that we use in our dynamic warm up. We incorporate this into all the workouts we do here at Defined Fitness, whether it's foam rolling at the start or end of a workout, a stretch in between sets, or getting warmed up with the dynamic warm up. But during your workout is not the only time to take advantage of this. Your off days are the best time and where the biggest benefits are found.

An Active Recovery day would start with self-myofascial release (SMR) through the use of a foam roller and possibly some deeper massage stick and tennis ball work on any points of muscle tension. Foam rolling helps to release knots in the muscles and break up scar tissue and adhesions in the muscles from past injuries/trauma (this should take about 8-10 minutes).

Pick up a foam roller here!

After we've foam rolled the entire body it's time to move onto some stretching.  The goal here is to   stretch the entire body with about 8-10 different stretches that are held for at least 30 seconds each. The previous SMR work that we've done has loosen the muscles up so that we can better stretch and get those tight muscles to loosen up. (again, about 8-10 minutes here).

And finally we would finish up with the movement prep exercise. This is were we are looking to use some low intensity exercises to active the muscles that we just stretched to help the stretches to stick. We typically like to use glute bridges, walking knee hugs, toe touches, hops, and even bodyweight squats, lunges, and TRX rows and push ups. (8-10 minutes here)

As you can see this is a very low intensity workout and will take only 24-30 minutes to complete.

Shoot for 4 days per week of strength training and metabolic training, but leave the remaining for 3 days for light Active Recovery work.

Happy New Year!!

Defined Fitness
Changing The Way Fitness Is Done!
www.definedfitnesswexford.com

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Thanks for all of your help? Because of our members we were able to give one family an awesome Christmas. We teamed up with Grieb Chiropractic Clinic and between their patients and our members the support was amazing. Additionally, Mattress Discounters came through and donated a bed for the family as well.