When you think about how to improve your exercise results, the first thing that comes to mind is often how to increase the amount of exercise you do. Recovery and rest after exercise don’t seem to be the most immediate method to achieve better results
Most people would consider adding an extra day at the gym each week, extending their workouts by 20 more minutes, or revising their diet to eat more healthily. This can range from eating more vegetables to adding some supplements.
However, what is typically overlooked as an essential component of workouts is not doing more exercise but giving yourself more rest. Those seeking to improve exercise results commonly underestimate the importance of rest, viewing it as wasted time that could be used to build more muscle strength. However, this is a serious mistake. Rest is, in fact, the time when your body is dedicated to building muscle, with exercise being merely the preparation phase for this process.
What Happens During a Workout?
Exercise involves muscles, the heart, the lymphatic system, hormones, the brain, and the entire body to support physical activity. Let’s focus on muscles and the heart.
What Happens in Your Muscles During a Workout?
When you exercise, you apply force to your muscles, subjecting them to stress they are not used to. As a result, muscles try to respond to the pressure and experience small tears.
When this happens, muscles send information to your body to send cells known as stem cells, which are responsible for binding the broken muscle fibers and fusing them. This fusion makes the fibers thicker and stronger, meaning that muscles grow at their core. Muscle fibers are protein, and when they break, part of that protein enters the circulatory system and must be filtered and eliminated by the kidneys.
To have enough material, an adequate amount of protein is necessary to facilitate the formation of new muscle fibers, and efficient cell proliferation and time for these processes to develop are also required.
In other words, your muscles will only grow if you achieve the right balance between muscle tissue degradation and the synthesis of new tissue. Even if you opt for high-intensity training, your body will go through this same process.
What Happens in Your Heart During a Workout?
Intense physical activity makes your body seek additional fuel to support the increased nutritional needs of the muscles. The body quickly depletes glucose and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) reserves, causing the heart to increase its rhythm and pump faster to supply the necessary oxygen. This oxygen is essential for generating more energy.
As a result, your heart increases its pace, starts pumping more oxygen, and muscles compress blood vessels to improve flow and carry more blood to the heart. In people without good physical condition, it takes longer for the heart to return to its normal rhythm after exercise. As your physical condition improves, the recovery period shortens.
What Happens During Post-Exercise Recovery?
While many conscious processes occur during exercise, such as sore muscles, increased heart rate, sweating, and adrenaline, the majority of the action is believed to take place during exercise time.
On the other hand, the post-exercise recovery phase does not seem to be as active, and the processes that take place during this period may not be as evident. Nevertheless, they do occur and, in many ways, are even more important than what happens during the exercise itself.
Muscles During the Post-Exercise Recovery Phase
When your body senses that your muscles are under pressure and the tissue is tearing, it tries to regulate this process by releasing lactate into the blood. The purpose of this is to facilitate energy production and prevent muscles from straining too much. It is this lactate that causes post-exercise discomfort.
Therefore, during the post-exercise recovery phase, muscles attempt to eliminate serum lactate while trying to form stronger and more resistant muscle fibers. To achieve this, they need a higher supply of proteins during this recovery period. If your muscles do not receive enough protein and rest, the muscle-building process could reverse and become a destructive process.
Your Heart During the Post-Exercise Recovery Phase
The effects on your heart and circulatory system during exercise can include a decrease in blood pressure due to central or peripheral vasodilation, depending on the type of exercise. In simple terms, this means that your blood vessels relax, widen, and create more space for blood flow, resulting in lower blood pressure. This decrease in blood pressure allows your heart to rest, meaning that blood flow has increased but with less effort from the heart.
On the contrary, not allowing your heart to rest implies that it won’t be able to function correctly, risking much more than just faster muscle growth. Rest is crucial for your heart; just observe how sleep deprivation can be devastating for its functioning.
How to Achieve High-Quality Rest After Exercise?
Many people are eager to get back to exercising to achieve their fitness goals, and rest is often in a low priority position on their list. However, it is crucial to change this perspective if you want to enjoy efficient workouts with quick results and avoid potential health problems that could set you back.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery:
- Get quality sleep to restore energy and maintain hormonal balance.
- Massages to stimulate the lymphatic system and aid in body repair.
- Stay hydrated to replenish electrolytes and facilitate the recovery of muscle fibers.
- Adequate magnesium intake to reduce serum lactate levels in the muscles.
- Hot and cold water showers to stimulate your body.
Rest and recovery after exercise are of fundamental importance because the lack of rest can make exercise futile. Not only can it hinder progress, but it can also potentially damage muscles, joints, and even the heart. It’s important to have a muscle recovery strategy.
When you stop exercising, your body mobilizes its restorative mechanisms to counteract the stress it has been subjected to. This restorative process results in larger and stronger muscles, a reinforced skeletal system, and an accelerated heart recovery rate.
During exercise, your muscles experience microtears in their fibers. During the rest phase, your body sends cells to repair them, fusing them to rebuild and strengthen muscle tissue.
Simultaneously, your body releases lactate into the bloodstream, initially benefiting the use of muscle fuel. However, prolonged lactate accumulation can disrupt your pH balance, causing more harm than good. The recovery phase allows your body to metabolize and eliminate lactate, responsible for post-exercise muscle discomfort.
Here’s why red light therapy is an ideal strategy for muscle recovery:
- Highly effective for muscle recovery, numerous studies support the effectiveness of red light therapy in muscle recovery. It accelerates the removal of serum lactate from the bloodstream, alleviating muscle fatigue.
- Easy to use, red light therapy devices require minimal preparation. Simply apply it directly to the skin and select the appropriate program. For example, Bioluxpro offers three operating modes.
- Red light therapy complements other muscle recovery techniques by eliminating serum lactate accumulation and improving circulation. Methods such as lymphatic therapy, hot and cold water showers, magnesium supplements, breathing exercises, and restorative sleep can be even more effective when combined with red light therapy.
- Red and near-infrared light used in therapy mimic the natural sunlight. Red light devices, like Bioluxpro, align with a holistic approach to healing and well-being, promoting natural processes.
- Drug-free, red light therapy stimulates natural processes without the use of chemicals or compounds. It energizes the body to distribute energy where it is needed most, offering a non-pharmacological approach without the side effects of medications and without withdrawal symptoms.
- Red light therapy is compatible with diets and exercise routines.
- Additional benefits, red light therapy goes beyond muscle recovery, providing a variety of health benefits, such as pain relief, improved sleep, reduced anxiety and depression, support in weight loss, assistance in joint and muscle repair, regeneration of damaged nerves, regulation of blood pressure, improved detoxification processes, and much more. It energizes the body and enhances its natural healing systems.
Regular use of red light therapy produces the most appropriate results, and a red light therapy device like BioluxPro allows you to conveniently integrate this therapy into your daily routine. Bioluxpro provides a solution to support your fitness and overall well-being goals.