You know what it takes to get to the top of your game.
You’re training every day — maybe more than once — for hours on end.
You eat right, you’re sleeping well, and you’re physically in the best shape of your life.
You take training seriously.
But… what about recovery training?
Recovery training is just as important — if not more — than high-intensity physical workouts.
Since it’s crucial that you maintain your daily workouts, it makes it hard to find adequate time to rest. But what if there was a way to help your body recover while you train?
What if there were methods that could help you become more physically and mentally resilient, facilitate injury prevention, and prolong your career while still maintaining your training schedule?
The good news is, there are.
And I’m here to help you.
What is Fitness Recovery Training and How Can it Help Prolong Your Career?
Fitness recovery training supports athletes and performers in pursuing mental and physical development, career longevity, and peak performance in their careers.
At Chase Your Wind, we work with athletes and performers to improve strength, speed, and other qualities that lead to improved athletic performance and injury prevention through methods that focus on:
Yoga for athletes — tailored specifically for your sport
Breathwork
Light-touch recovery
Flexibility training
Static stretching
Mindfulness
Guided meditation
Mobility training
Fitness recovery training at Chase Your Wind is much more than the best way to physically recover from workouts. It’s also about mental resilience, training your body and your mind through breathwork, guided meditations, mindful living, and tracking thought patterns. It’s about guiding you to be the best version of yourself.
It helps you gain insight and awareness of any limiting beliefs that stop you from maximizing your potential on the way to the top as a pro-athlete and performer.
Mental resilience training can teach you about any addictive habits, triggers, or past traumatic experiences. By understanding your body and mind better, you’ll know how much rest you need, what food to eat, and how much to train.
During physical workouts, your body experiences an intense burst of physiological stress. These workouts should be followed by a recovery period. If you don't follow up with a proper recovery routine, it can increase the probability of injury, and ailment, and even shorten the span of your career.
Mental resilience training is not an option but a must for a successful athlete and performer. Addressing emotional and mental blockages is necessary for peak performance so you can make it to the top. Without anything holding you back.
Overtraining and Signs Your Body Needs Rest: Restoring Homeostasis During Athletic Recovery
Homeostasis is a state of balance in the body that occurs when your internal conditions such as temperature, pH, and blood pressure are stable and consistent. Recovery is the process the body goes through to restore this homeostasis.
Overtraining syndrome is common among athletes who often exercise longer and harder than most to reach peak performance in their sport — especially when preparing for an upcoming competition, performance, or event. They work to the point of burnout, not allowing themselves a rest day or time for recovery fearing it will hurt their performance on the big day.
But the opposite can be true.
Inadequate recovery can compromise homeostasis causing muscle tears, dehydration, pain, inflammation, fatigue, carbon dioxide-oxygen imbalances in your blood, and decreased immunity. This is a sign that your body requires rest, relaxation, and recovery.
Signs of overtraining syndrome can include:
Decreased performance over a 7-10 day period. A decrease in agility, strength, and endurance, slower reaction times, and speed.
Decrease in appetite and weight loss. Exhaustion due to overtraining can actually lead to appetite suppression instead of stimulation.
Metabolic imbalances. Overtraining can cause nutrient deficiencies and medical complications. This can involve the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems.
Increased resting heart rate (RHR). Workouts can feel unusually difficult and result in an abnormally elevated heart rate during the workout and take longer for your heart rate to return to normal.
Restless sleep or insomnia. Stress hinders restful sleep and makes the body’s repair process less effective.
Irritability, anxiety, depression, and moodiness. Overtraining can create an imbalance in stress hormones. This can cause mood swings, irritability, and concentration issues.
Chronic or slow-healing injuries, and low immunity. Overworked joints and muscles can cause constant aches and pain. Overtraining puts strain on all of the systems in the body and can lower the immune response. Frequent illness is a sign that the body needs to rest.
Psychological stress and/or depression. Inability to train or race due to over-training complications can significantly affect your mental state, especially if you rely on your body’s performance for your career or source of stress relief. This is why it’s so important to incorporate mindfulness and mental resilience training into your daily routine.
The number of rest days your body needs depends on the intensity and nature of your workouts. But it’s important to take at least one day of complete and total rest from high-impact physical activity every seven to 10 days.
How to Recover Faster From Workouts and Overtraining: The Benefits of Passive and Active Recovery
Understanding and monitoring recovery includes rest, refueling, rehydration, regeneration, and recognizing your mentality.
Recovering from overtraining syndrome may include a reduction in training load or frequency. This can look like taking a break from exercise or training completely or changing the usual workout to something more low intensity until the symptoms subside.
This is known as either:
Passive recovery — taking the day completely off from exercise or physical training.
Active recovery — engaging in a low-intensity exercise, putting very little, if any, stress on the body.
During recovery, the body regenerates soft tissue and increases blood circulation. Increased blood flow helps remove the byproducts from muscle breakdown that builds up during exercise and brings nutrients to the tissues. This increased blood flow helps repair and rebuild the muscles, ligaments, and tendons. The goal of active recovery is to speed up this process while allowing you to maintain a training schedule.
Active recovery methods can include walking, swimming, jogging, yoga, cycling, or stretching. Find an activity that’s low-intensity but still keeps your heart rate at 30-60% of your maximum heart rate.
Passive recovery days are also a great time to focus on mindfulness, meditation, mental resilience, and breathwork while still giving your body adequate rest.
While monitoring your recovery progress, some of the easiest ways to do it are through:
Monitoring the breath
A person’s depth and rate of breathing change significantly under mental and physical exertion. Rapid breathing from overworking forces high amounts of carbon dioxide out of the lungs, throwing your body’s pH levels out of balance and decreasing your capacity for high-intensity exercise.
Slow, deep breaths oxygenate the body and regulate levels of carbon dioxide, which is important for maintaining blood pH.
Becoming aware of your breathing patterns is an effective way to assess recovery. Incorporating breathwork can help decrease recovery times and increase stamina.
Breathwork can also help increase lung capacity, and help manage your breath to increase endurance during competition. It can also be used to identify tight, overused muscles and any weak muscles you need to strengthen.
Monitoring the Heart
Resting Heart Rate (RHR) is determined by averaging several heart rate measurements over 5 days taken upon waking.
During training, the heart rate shouldn’t be more than 8 beats per minute higher than RHR. If the heart rate is higher than that it might be a good idea to take that day off from training and focus on passive or low-intensity activities.
Methods to enhance, and encourage recovery can also include:
Massage
Cryotherapy
Compression therapy
Hydrotherapy
After a full recovery, you should feel pain-free, refreshed, and ready for the next training session.
Why Choose Me As Your Fitness and Recovery Coach?
I used to train 5-6 days a week and 4-5 hours at a time every day. My training would consist of running, yoga, swimming, and rock climbing. Cardio was a huge part of my workouts. I felt that if I wasn’t literally dripping with sweat it didn’t count. Later on, I started training in martial arts and weight lifting.
To put it mildly, fitness is my passion.
Living in NYC, the gym was my second home. The swimming pool made it feel like you were swimming in the Hudson River because of these floor-to-ceiling clear glass windows. There was a running track, a boxing ring, a rock climbing wall, a sundeck, and a spa. It was like Disneyland for me.
I would push myself to the point of exhaustion. I had no clue about implementing fitness recovery. I was in constant pain and I'd become addicted to this pain. It was a way for me to cope with mental and emotional challenges that I had no idea how to address. It was the perfect escape and with my competitive side and my love of being active, it worked very well for me.
Until it didn’t.
Once the pain started to affect my workouts, I could no longer avoid it. The aches began to affect my range of motion and mobility. My breathing felt restricted and I was in constant pain from head to toe. It wasn’t until I started practicing breathwork and other forms of bodywork that I started to feel relief.
I learned to utilize my breath to cope with my pain as I stretched my tight and overworked muscles.
Bodywork and light touch helped me release stagnant energy that I held in my body. Energy that wasn't able to move freely due to my muscle tension and emotional blockages. These modalities have helped me become more in touch with my mind and body. They've helped me identify the cause of the blocks so I could release them. This has greatly improved my athletic performance and overall well-being.
Later on, I started meditating and that helped me ground myself in my body and bring me to the present moment — which is essential for a pro-athlete or performer.
As my fitness recovery journey continued, I started learning about form and alignment. I became curious about how my body was moving, which movements caused pain in my body and why, the muscles I needed to strengthen, and the ones I needed to stretch. I learned to think of my body as a living, breathing organism and how important it was to exercise my mind as well as my body.
I’ve come to understand the importance of fitness recovery, the best way to recover from workouts, injury prevention, and taking care of my body for longevity.
I’ve become educated about the nervous system, and how to bring the nervous system to a parasympathetic state through light touch. The parasympathetic nervous system —often called rest and digest — is responsible for bringing our body back to a state of relaxation. It slows the heart rate, the breath, and stimulates digestion. It essentially reverses the effects of the sympathetic nervous system — the flight or flight — after a high-intensity workout or during moments of tension.
I’ve learned that my mental state has a direct impact on my physical performance and that my emotional triggers took the form of stagnant energy which manifested itself through pain, decreased mobility, limited flexibility, restricted breathing, and overall physical discomfort.
Since then, I’ve made it a mission to incorporate fitness recovery training into my athletic training every single day. And now, as a high-performance and fitness recovery coach, I’d love to help you do the same.
Book a call with me here.
