Train Hard, Recover Hard: How to Rest and Recover With Litesport
At Litesport, it’s easy to get excited about stepping into the ring and dialing into the full intensity of your boxing workouts as you try and max out your punch score or beat your personal best. But between all that full-body fitness is another equally important (and often overlooked) part of your workout: rest and recovery.
When you train hard, you need to recover hard. And that’s because it’s during rest and recovery that the body rebuilds, restores, and repairs from the stress of your workout. This is the key to keeping your body healthy, reaching your goals, and avoiding injury along the way.
So how can you recover after a tough fight in the ring? We’ve got all the answers in this rest and recovery break-down.
What’s Happening in Your Body During a Litesport Workout
Your body is constantly working hard to maintain a state of balance, otherwise known as homeostasis. Any kind of stress, such as when your fists are flying in your Litesport workout, can throw your body off balance and disrupt that state of homeostasis.
Why’s that? Well, here are some things happening in the body during your workout:
- Your muscles fibers are tearing as they grow
- Your glucose or energy stores decrease as your body uses up energy to power your workout
- Your heart rate, blood flow, and oxygen consumption elevate
- The pressure on your joints increases
Luckily, your body is not only built to overcome these stressors but actually gets stronger and healthier as a result. This is called the Principle of Adaptation, which states that as you continually undergo the stress of a workout, your body gets more and more efficient at managing that stress.
That’s why a 10-minute Advanced Express workout with Chris can leave you barely hanging on one month but you can plow through it the next. Thanks to regular exercise, your body is getting stronger and healthier.
However, the key to this growth and improvement is rest and recovery. For your body to become more efficient at overcoming stress, it needs time to actually overcome the stress. If you continue to challenge your body day in and day out without recovery your body and your mind will suffer.
Over time this can lead to:
- Fatigue
- Decreased performance
- Injury
- Illness
- Trouble sleeping
- Mood changes and lower motivation
- Prolonged muscle soreness or pain
- Reduced appetite
Benefits of Rest and Recovery
Aside from avoiding all those negative consequences of overwork, there are a ton of other benefits to listening to your body and giving it the recovery it needs. Even though it might feel like you’re being lazy or hitting pause on your fitness goals, here are the big reasons why you need rest and recovery:
Replenish glycogen stores
It takes a lot of energy to get through a workout (especially those 30-minute trainer classes!). This depletes your body’s energy stores or muscle glycogen. A rest day helps replenish your energy so you can step into the ring ready to fight in your next workout.
Repair damaged muscle tissue
Your body is quite literally ripping up your muscles during your workout. Recovery gives your muscle tissues time to repair and grow back stronger.
Flush out toxins from the body
When you exercise and burn up the energy in your muscle tissue this leaves behind metabolic byproducts in your muscle cells. With recovery, your body’s circulatory system can do a refresh to remove these unwanted byproducts.
Help prevent injury
There is such a thing as going too hard in the ring, especially if you’re new to Litesport or just starting a workout program. We know you have goals you’re punching for, but going too hard too fast could lead to injury or pain in the body that’ll force you to rest whether you wanted it or not.
Give your brain a rest day
Working out is not just hard on your body, but on your mind too. It’s mentally exhausting to continually push yourself to go harder and be better, especially if you don’t build in needed rest days. The more mentally exhausted you feel, the more likely you’ll be to give up on your fitness goals or to throw off other elements of your life like your relationships or work.
How to Build in Rest and Recovery
So how can you build more rest and recovery into your workout routine? There are several ways to do this:
Space out your high-intensity exercise
Everyone’s workout routine is going to look a little bit different depending on factors like your fitness level, goals, schedule, and personal health.
But regardless of where you are in your fitness journey, it’s important to be mindful of your schedule so you don’t overwork yourself with back-to-back high-intensity exercise without needed recovery time. Instead, swap in low-intensity or medium-intensity days in between your high-intensity workouts.
What’s high-intensity?
High-intensity is any workout that elevates your heart rate up or beyond 70-80% of your maximum heart rate for 10 minutes or longer. If you’re not monitoring your heart rate, then think about it as how hard you perceive that workout to be. If it feels hard and you’re breathing heavy, it’s probably high intensity. This is going to look different from person to person.
Schedule time for active recovery
Active recovery is a low-intensity workout that puts minimal stress on your body. You can do active recovery immediately following a tough workout to help return your body to homeostasis or on its own for more of an active rest day. Studies show that active recovery post-workout can speed up your recovery time.
Build in rest days
While regular exercise is an important part of staying healthy it’s also important to build in actual rest days where your body is doing exactly as it sounds: resting.
The American Council on Exercise (ACE) suggests building in a rest day every seven to 10 days if you engage in high-intensity exercise such as Litesport. This gives your body built-in break time to build and restore from the hard work you put it through in the ring.
Listen to your body
So how do you know when to take a rest day, an active recovery day, or a high-intensity day? There is a lot of strategy and science you can use to answer this question, but the simple answer is: listen to your body.
Your body will send out signals when it’s feeling fatigued, sore, tired, or unmotivated. It can take a bit of practice to tune in to your body’s frequency. But once you learn how to read the signs, your body will tell you when you need a break and when you’re ready to go!
Get some sleep
One of the most important methods of recovery is something you do every single day: sleeping! When you don’t get enough sleep this throws off your body’s hormone levels which can increase your stress, impact your energy, and limit your body’s ability to repair muscle tissue. Without sleep, your body is less effective at what it needs to do to recover. This could lead to injury or illness if you consistently don’t get enough of those Zzzs.
What are your favorite active recovery and rest activities? Let us know in the comments below! And make sure to check out all these classes and more on Litesport. Not sure where to get started? Start with our 7-day free trial and check out our blog post on 5 Ways to Workout with Litesport for tips.
Sources:
- https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/the_importance_of_rest_and_recovery_for_athletes
- https://blog.nasm.org/the-science-of-recovery
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5932411/
- https://www.acefitness.org/education-and-resources/lifestyle/blog/7176/8-reasons-to-take-a-rest-day/
- https://www.acefitness.org/certifiednewsarticle/2757/training-recovery-the-most-important-component-of-your-clients-exercise-programs/
- https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ije/2015/591729/