5 Steps to Speed Up Muscle Recovery After a Workout

How to speed up muscle recovery

Don’t you love that feeling you get right after a good workout? You feel spent but in the best of ways. What isn’t pleasant is the feeling a day or two later when your muscles are rebelling against the torture you put them under. This post-workout muscle pain, called delayed onset muscle soreness, is proof that you’ve put your muscles under enough stress to grow in size or strength. Yay, right? But…ouch! Luckily, you aren’t the first to feel the burn and professionals have found proven ways to help speed up your muscle recovery.

Follow these five steps for quicker relief.

1. Get Plenty of Sleep

When you are in a deep sleep, your mind and body are at rest, letting all your energy go towards regeneration and recuperation.

This is the perfect time for all your stressed muscle fibers to be healed and recover from the grueling workout you just did.

Of course, if you don’t provide the body with enough time to complete this rest and regeneration cycle, your muscle will take longer to get back to their normal state.

To help your muscles recover as quickly as possible, aim to get at least seven hours of sleep each night. As a bonus, you’ll feel more energized as well.

2. Take an Ice Bath

As your muscles react to the added stress, they build up waste products in the muscle cells called lactic acid. To flush out this waste, take an ice bath.

You don’t have to immerse your whole body in ice cold water, only the affected muscles. To take such drastic measures it better be worth it, right?

When you put your body into really cold water, your blood vessels constrict. Then, when you get out, they relax and open back up to allow blood to flow through your veins.

This process will flush out those built up lactic acids and help your muscles recover quicker.

3. Foam Roll It Out

When you complete a hard workout, do you notice that your muscles might tighten up and form a knot?

This knot is called a myofascial abrasion. To release this knot, you have two choices, massage or foam rolling. Since most people don’t have their own personal masseuse, foam rolling is the easier option.

Foam rolling is a process that involves rolling your body over a cylinder piece of semi hard foam putting even pressure into the afflicted area until the knot is released.

You may need to repeat this process three or four times for a few minutes each time until your muscles feel nice and limber.

4. Take CBD Oil Post Workout

They have found so many benefits of CBD oil. Many of these benefits are due to CBD’s anti-inflammatory properties.

By supplementing with CBD oil post-workout, you can reduce the inflammation that causes much of the muscle soreness.

Another way that CBD can help speed up post exercise muscle recovery is by improving your quality of sleep. As discussed in the first point made in this article, quality sleep is essential to allow your muscles to recuperate.

The cannabidiol in CBD also boosts the function of the endocannabinoid system of the body responsible for many of the cell signaling in our bodies.

It is believed that the main purpose of the endocannabinoid system is to maintain homeostasis, or internal balance, in the body. It would make sense that improvement of this system would help to heal sore muscles.

5. Rehydrate

Your body sweats to release heat, and when you workout, you sweat a lot. Sweating will drain the body of hydration, which you need to replenish for many reasons.

One being that dehydrated muscles hurt more!

Similar to the blood flow caused by ice baths to clean out the accumulated waste products formed by stressed muscles, water is a catalyst in this cleaning process.

Water also acts as a transport system to replenish your muscles with vital nutrients after a hard workout, specifically electrolytes. When your muscles lack electrolytes, this is when they begin to cramp and get weak.

You can help replenish your electrolytes even better by choosing water that is fortified with these minerals or a sports drink.