Recovery After Exercise: Here’s How to Do It Right

Why you should pay more attention to recovery after exercise.

How much time do you spend training each week? And how much time do you spend on recovery? Be careful—this doesn’t mean time when you’re not training. While you can usually answer the first question pretty clearly, the answer regarding targeted recovery tends to be a bit vague—right? Of course, you’ll say: Every minute I’m not running, biking, lifting weights, or working out is recovery from exercise. But that’s not entirely true. Of course, you don’t challenge your muscles and cardiovascular system in everyday life the way you do during exercise. But you can’t really rest while you’re at work or driving either. That’s because these activities demand other bodily functions and senses, requiring you to stay alert and perform at your best.

Mitochondrial Regeneration

The powerhouses of our cells play a central role in our energy balance and physical performance not only during the day but also at night. As soon as we drift off to sleep, the mitochondria in our brain’s nerve cells continue to work at full capacity to flush metabolic intermediates and end products out of the brain via the lymphatic system during deep sleep.

Every day, exercise or physical exertion destroys mitochondria in muscle cells. Only when you recover sufficiently—both in terms of quality and quantity—will your cells form new mitochondria.

What’s often forgotten amid all the enthusiasm for sports: Every physical exertion requires the necessary amount of recovery. Only then does the body have the chance to improve and reach a higher level of performance. If the body doesn’t have enough time to recover and repair itself after exercise, you may easily find that you’re not making progress. In the worst case, you’ll enter a downward spiral of declining performance, leading to chronic fatigue, burnout, and injuries.

The body then no longer has a chance to adequately process the demands placed on it. That’s why strategically timed recovery phases are just as important as the training itself and the stimulus it provides. During recovery phases, the body must adequately prepare itself for subsequent physical demands.

If the breaks are too short or if the intensity is too high too often, you’ll start the next training session already exhausted and will gradually wear yourself down more and more with each session.

Your goal should be to strike a balance between efficient, performance-enhancing training and sufficient recovery. If there is no balance between recovery and exercise, you will either not improve at all—because the training stimulus was too weak or the rest period was too long—or you will overexert yourself.

The duration of recovery after exercise depends heavily on your fitness level and overall health, and of course on the physical and mental stresses of the day. Elite athletes are able to complete several training sessions a day. Yet they still start the next morning feeling well-rested. In contrast, people who aren’t quite as fit may need up to 72 hours to recover from a 1- or 2-hour fitness workout. So the less you’re used to exercising, the longer recovery takes after a workout.

The more intensely we’ve worked or trained, the more important—and time-consuming—it is to actively recover. And that starts with a light post-workout stretch immediately after finishing your workout. The combination of post-workout stretching and myofascial self-massage takes about 12–13 minutes.

Your heart rate recovery (HRR) helps you determine how quickly you recover from a workout. Heart rate recovery is a 2-minute heart rate measurement taken immediately after a strenuous, intense activity. Your heart rate during the exercise must have reached an age-specific threshold.

You can use your heart rate recovery as an indicator of your fitness level and your ability to handle physical stress:

At the end of a very intense training session or competition, it has become standard practice in elite sports for athletes to cool down for a few minutes immediately after the exertion, either by jogging or by performing a 5- to 10-minute warm-down on a stationary bike with varying resistance. This further increases blood flow to the muscles that have been worked. The benefits are immediately noticeable. This light exertion helps redistribute the accumulated lactate and acids without causing further cellular damage.

Below, we’ll introduce you to options for active recovery after exercise. These methods not only ensure better recovery after exercise but also help you recover quickly from it.

Self-massage techniques like foam rolling not only shorten your recovery time after a workout but also improve your flexibility. This rolling technique works through a combination of pressure and movement. Rolling reduces muscle tone; muscles and fascia are shifted against one another, making them more supple. That’s why this type of massage is also called myofascial massage—from “myo” (muscle) and “fascial” (fascia). This helps loosen adhesions and tightness in muscles, tendons, and fascia. It also promotes blood circulation. By slowly rolling over these areas—known as trigger points—during fascia training with the BLACKROLL® fascia roller, you penetrate deeper into the tissue and can release the adhesions.

Option 1: A short nap of no more than 15 minutes—counting from the moment you fall asleep.

Option 2: You sleep for about two to two and a half hours. By then, it’s very likely that you’ve gone through a complete sleep cycle consisting of light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. In this case, performance improvements lasting up to six hours are likely.

So it’s worth prioritizing recovery, whether you’re a professional athlete or a recreational athlete. Not only will you generally feel more refreshed, but you’ll also be rewarded with improved fitness. Your body can process the training stimulus much more effectively, adapts more quickly, and is able to handle new stimuli much sooner. All of this, in turn, means you can improve your performance much faster.

Unlike a professional athlete, a recreational athlete has a job that demands a lot from them and causes stress. These factors should also be reflected in the training load—both duration and intensity. This can go so far that, after particularly exhausting days at the office, you either skip training altogether or train at a low intensity. In this case, exercise serves more as a way to balance and recover than to boost performance.

For these reasons, it’s so important that you also think about your recovery management—that is, what tools and strategies you use and when to use them to recover fully and be fit again for the next (training) day.