Do you take time to recover? One of the biggest mistakes people make in the pursuit of improved fitness or fitness goals is going too hard on days they shouldn’t be. In fact, without recovering properly, you could stall your progress — or worse, reverse it. The fact is, exercise puts stress on the body creating tiny mirco tears in your muscles, which then repair themselves thus creating strength. However, in order to see results from that stress, you need to give your muscles time to adapt and recover. In addition, your body initiates an inflammatory response after a hard workout in order to hep you recover. But doing too much high intensity exercise can use that inflammatory response to work against you. It can actually increase overall inflammation in your body and weaken your immune system, which makes you more susceptible to illness. So these rest days are literally helping to keep you healthy! Too much exercise without enough recovery days can also affect your sleep. It can put your body in a constant state of restlessness or on high alert making a good night’s sleep tough to achieve. Taking those rest days can help bring down your alertness and heart rate, which can help get you a night of sound sleep. The best way to help your body recover and reach your goals is to incorporate active recovery days into your weekly schedule. That means easy sessions done at no more than 60 to 70 percent of your maximum effort…. At inBalance, this means classes like yoga or Pilates. These classes will help boost your circulation, introducing new oxygen and nutrients into your muscles and reduced soreness so you’ll be ready to hit it hard during your next high intensity workout! Track your heart rate in these classes to stay in the bottom 2 heart rate zones to ensure you are staying in that 60% range!
What an Active Recovery Day Should Look Like at inBalance
We’ve got plenty of classes to help with your active recovery days… Classes like yoga sculpt, Mat Pilates and Vinyasa are great to keep your heart rate in that lower recovery zone to help your body repair itself. Other classes include Restorative yoga, Hatha flow or any other related class!