https://youtu.be/fhysOGFNw8A
Learn how to recover like a pro! 🏋️♂️ In this video, Coach Ben dives deep into the five key areas of recovery: sleep, stress management, training, nutrition, and those bonus “little extras” like saunas, ice baths, and massages. Discover actionable tips to optimize your recovery, boost your performance, and stay consistent on your fitness journey.
Transcript:
Hello everyone, welcome back to the Vegan Proteins YouTube channel. My name is Ben, I’m one of the coaches here at Vegan Proteins Online Coaching, as well as a competitive natural bodybuilder. And today, I’m going to be talking to you about how to recover like a pro.
So, I’m going to break this down into five distinct areas. We’re going to be talking about sleep, stress management, training, nutrition, and then what I’m going to call the miscellaneous category, which I think may be the most interesting for people to hear my opinion on. This includes things like the sauna, ice bath, hot cold therapy, cryotherapy, the normatec boots, massages, massage guns, stretching, mobility, anything that would fall under this category that doesn’t fall under the other four.
So first, I’m going to touch on what I consider to be the big rocks, which would be sleep, stress, training, and nutrition. So with sleep, some of my tips are going to include getting an amount of sleep that allows you to feel well-rested and energized throughout the day. It’s going to be a little bit different for everyone, but I would say a general range or heuristic would be between seven to nine hours of sleep per night.
Of course, you may have a circumstance that prevents you from getting within this range. Maybe you feel fine on six or six is the most that you can get, or maybe you need ten to feel fully well-rested. That is okay.
Now, if you need to do things like take a little 30 or 60 minute nap in the middle of the day, as long as it’s not impacting your sleep, I think that’s something that can be perfectly fine. Caffeine is something to watch out for if you’re having caffeine late in the day. We know that there are different phenotypes when it comes to how fast people metabolize caffeine.
So some people can have caffeine and it’ll be out of their system fairly quickly. Other people, it can take 10-12 hours from when they had the caffeine and it’s still affecting them from either falling asleep. Or what I didn’t know until recently is that it’s not only your ability to fall asleep, but it’s also the quality of the sleep as you get later in your sleep cycles.
I noticed this myself where I would have caffeine maybe at like one or two and I’d be able to fall asleep just fine, but then I would wake up earlier than I expected to wake up and I’d be tossing and turning a little bit more. Some other things that can help promote good sleep quality are going to bed and waking up at similar times each day if you can. Of course, some people have more variable schedules, so you want to just do the best that you can with this.
If it’s a range of one to two hours of sleeping or waking each day, that’s probably okay. The more consistent you can get into routine with sleep, the more likely it is for your sleep to be higher quality. Another thing is sleep environment.
Generally, a cooler sleep environment, a more dark sleep environment, are things that can help. One thing that I recently started doing was getting a white noise machine and putting that on while I sleep. Sometimes a fan can work well for people.
I know that I tend to get hot pretty easily during the night, so keeping a cool room and maybe having some blankets that you can put on if you get cold, that’s something that has worked well for me. And then the last thing that I would touch on is kind of food or water around sleep. Some people will find that if they eat too close to bed, then that impairs their sleep, or if they are starving going to bed, that also impairs their sleep, so finding that sweet spot for you.
And then with fluids, you probably want to taper them down as you get closer to the nighttime if possible so that you’re not waking up a million times in the middle of the night to go pee. And that would be most of what I have to say around sleep. It’s hard to exactly quantify sometimes what it means to manage your stress, but I think that it can be as simple as finding things to do throughout the day that you enjoy, or carving out some time at the end of the day, the beginning of the day, whatever based on your schedule works for you, where you’re doing an activity that brings you peace, that allows you to just focus on that one thing and maybe take your mind off of whatever else you have going on.
That could be reading a book, it could be watching a TV show, it could be calling a friend, it could be drawing, whatever it is that brings you joy and a sense of peace, I think is something that you should actively try to carve into your day if possible so that you can switch off and turn off from work, maybe it’s home life, whatever situation is creating stress, if you can find a way to take your mind off of that for a period of time and just be mindful and present with what you are doing, perhaps taking some deep breaths, there’s a lot of different mindfulness meditation practices that you can implement, breath work, just focusing on when you’re getting stressed, taking some deep breaths and really trying to calm down your nervous system. I think that just generally taking an approach that is more stoic, focusing on the things that you can control throughout your day and trying your best to stay positive no matter what it is going on in your life. I know that’s kind of cliche to say and it’s not super concrete, but the more that you focus on what is within your control and try not to focus on what is outside of your control, find time to do the things that you enjoy doing, preferably with maybe loved ones, whether that be companion animals, whether that be friends, family, whoever is in your life.
I think the social aspect of stress management can definitely be important. Of course, know yourself. Some people are more in the introverted or extroverted side of the spectrum, but just finding something to do during your day that brings you joy or finding some time to carve out for yourself is very important.
Stress is stress is stress. So if you are adding stress onto your plate, whether that be from work or wherever it’s coming from, it’s impact your training, it’s going to impact everything. Stress is not just compartmentalized to training stress or compartmentalized to work stress or life stress.
It’s all kind of this cumulative bucket of stress. I think where this ties in well is talking about training. When we think about recovery from training, we first want to make sure that we are following a program that allows for adequate recovery.
The higher your stress is just generally in life, probably the less work you can tolerate and make progress on. When I say work, I’m usually talking about the cumulative total amount of things that you are doing in the gym. Maybe you’re also a runner or you have other athletic pursuits that you are engaged in.
And the more stress that you have, the less recovery you have as well. So I think a good starting point for most people is somewhere between six to 10 sets per muscle group per week. You can start by splitting that up between perhaps three full body training sessions, getting in those kind of basic movement patterns, a vertical and horizontal push and pull, a hip hinge, a squat and accessories for any other muscle groups that you want to develop.
Focusing on training within a couple reps of failure. So you should see some rep speed slow down from the first rep to the last rep, maybe generally between the 5 and 15 rep range if I’m talking in broad generalities. Outside of that, aiming for between 8 to 10,000 steps a day as a good starting point.
I think just getting some general movement and breaking up sedentary time can be really helpful for recovery and just overall work capacity. And also just making sure that you are not doing too much. So I’d say this is less of a problem than not doing enough, but there are still people who fall into this camp where they’re trying to do two hours of cardio every day, weight training for an hour, and then they have their Pilates and their yoga class on top of that.
It can be a lot. So try to cut down on the areas that are not as important if you’re finding it difficult to recover and do all of the things that you want to do and you’re tired and you don’t have energy. Focus on the basics and the minimum and you can always go up from there.
Usually I’m trying to start people at the lowest amount that they can do and still make progress, get them to adhere to that, and then we can slowly build that up if necessary. But if you’re making good progress, you don’t necessarily need to do more. More is not always better.
Usually when we’re talking about muscle building, it is a game of over-recovery. You want to be able to recover the best that you can before you come into that next training session. Now it’s okay to train if you’re a little bit sore.
It’s not a big deal. You can just make sure that you are easing into your workout, you’re warming up properly, etc. Then on the nutrition side of things, I think that as long as you are following pretty good sound evidence-based practices, what that could include is eating three quarters to one gram of protein per pound of body weight.
If you’re on the leaner side, if you’re on the heavier side, then you can go on that same scale but go by lean body mass or ideal or desired body weight. Trying to spread that protein between three to five meals throughout the day if possible. Trying to get adequate servings of fruits and vegetables, so at least five, probably up to ten to see kind of the quote-unquote maximal health benefits from that because these fruits and vegetables have a lot of micronutrients which are going to help with recovery, have things like antioxidants which are going to decrease inflammation and free radical formation and just help our body to recover better.
Protein is another thing that helps to make sure that we are recovering adequately, specifically for the resistance training that we’re doing. Then depending on your goals, if you’re in a fat loss phase, a maintenance phase, or a building phase, you want to make sure that you are eating for the context of your goals. If you are in a fat loss phase, you don’t want to eat so little that you are rapidly dropping weight and you don’t have a lot of energy, you can’t keep up your strength in the gym because you’re going to lose muscle mass, you’re not going to recover to the extent that you should be recovering.
And if you’re at maintenance or in a slight calorie surplus, this adequate amount of energy is going to allow you to devote the proper recovery resources and maybe even recover from a little bit more in the gym. And if you can do a little bit more, sometimes that can lead to better results. Not always though, as I mentioned previously, more does not always equal better.
It is context dependent. And that is why working with a coach can be so helpful. So a quick plug for vegan proteins coaching.
If you are spinning your wheels in the gym, you’re not sure how to make progress, you’ve been stuck for a long time. That’s what we do at vegan proteins. We help people bust through plateaus, figure out maybe some areas that they’re missing out on that maybe they’ve overlooked and help them dial in things to make sure that they’re getting the results that they want.
So if you’re interested in coaching, you can head over to veganproteins.com. You can fill out an application and we will get back to you ASAP. So now that I’ve talked about those four big rocks, training, nutrition, sleep, and stress management, we’re going to go on to what I like to call the little one percenters of the small pebbles. We talked about the big rocks.
Now we’re talking about the small pebbles. Things like ice bath, sauna, stretching, foam rolling, mobility, massage, any sort of trendy recovery thing that people are doing these days. Now, I’m not saying that these have no benefits, but I think the benefit is usually from going back to one of the first points, stress management.
If these things help you to relax and unwind and feel like you’re doing something good for your body, they make you feel good, then they’re probably going to help with recovery just from that decrease in the stress that you’re experiencing. If getting massage is a very stress relieving activity for you, it’s probably going to help your recovery. Same thing with sitting in the sauna.
If you’re finding that that’s helping you to be present and just kind of relax and unwind a little bit. For me, I get hot really easily. I don’t enjoy the sauna and I don’t particularly love being in freezing cold water, doing something like an ice bath either.
So for me, that wouldn’t be something that would increase my recovery because I would probably be a little bit more stressed by doing those things, but some people are the opposite. So know yourself, know which things tend to make you feel good because those are the things that are going to help with your recovery. So hopefully this video has provided you with some practical takeaways to apply to your own fitness journey, your fitness trajectory.
Again, if you’re looking for some help, that’s what we do here at Vegan Protein, so head over to our website and check us out. You can also find us on social media at veganproteins at musclesbybrussels and my handle on Instagram is at benamitchell. Thank you for tuning into this video and I will catch you guys in the next one.