Post-Workout Muscle Recovery: How to Let Your Muscles Heal and Why

Rest and Recovery Let Your Muscles Heal and Make You Stronger

The damage that exercise causes triggers your body’s immune system to repair that damage, explains Adam Rivadeneyra, MD, a sports medicine physician with the Hoag Orthopedic Institute and the Orthopaedic Specialty Institute in Orange, California. And when your body’s tissues — from your muscles and bones to heart and lungs — recover, they become slightly fitter than they were before. That way, the next time you perform the same workout, you won’t suffer as much damage.

“But you have to cause some damage to your body for it to adapt,” Dr. Rivadeneyra says.

Repeated again and again, this process of stress and recovery is what results in improved health and fitness.

Post-Workout Muscle Recovery Helps Keeps You Safe and Injury-Free

Just don’t skimp on the rest and recovery part. Rest helps reenergize the body so you have the stamina to give it your all during your next workout, says Melissa Leber, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. You can’t push it to your maximum without giving your body time to recoup in between. That’s overtraining.

“Overtraining can lead to overuse, which can lead to burnout and injury,” Dr. Leber explains. Common overuse injuries include iliotibial band syndrome, stress fractures, patellofemoral syndrome (runner’s knee), and muscle strains.What’s more, research suggests inadequate rest and recovery can contribute to poor immune function, neurological changes, hormonal disturbances, and depression.

What’s the Best Way to Help My Muscles Recover?

Everyone has unique workout recovery needs. Factors such as current fitness level as well as exercise history, workout frequency, duration, intensity, and type all impact the amount and type of rest that a person needs.

Non-fitness-related stressors — such as poor sleep, relationship troubles, and working overtime — can affect how much rest and what type of recovery a person may need from a given workout, too.

For example, children, teenagers, and older adults may require more post-workout recovery compared with young and middle-age adults, Rivadeneyra says. People who are out of shape or new to exercise may need more recovery, or even passive recovery, to repair their muscles and rebuild their energy stores according to a review published in April 2021 in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance

However, some fitter individuals may need more recovery because they are regularly exercising at a higher intensity.

The schedule of the average gym-goer who exercises four or five days per week — combining a mix of high-intensity workouts, cross-training routines, and active recovery days — and takes the remaining two or three days off allows for proper recovery, according to Rivadeneyra.

Fitter individuals may be able to use this strategy (alternating between high-intensity workouts, varied activity, and active recovery) six or seven days per week without taking any day completely off.

What’s important to remember is that recovery looks different for everyone, Rivadeneyra adds.

“For an elite marathoner, running 4 or 5 miles can be an active recovery workout,” he says. “For someone new to running, a 20-minute cycling session would be more appropriate for recovery.”

At the same time, no matter what your overall fitness level is, it’s also important to pay attention to your individual needs. Even that elite marathon runner who can usually work out seven days per week, will likely need a little bit more recovery after, say, running a longer distance than usual, running a particularly hilly course that they’re not used to, or completing a race while recovering from a cold.

That’s why it is critical to pay attention to both how you feel and how your body is responding to your workouts. Exercise plateaus (when you can’t seem to push yourself harder), mental fatigue, feelings of burnout, and extreme muscle soreness that lasts for more than three or four days are all signs that you need to increase your workout recovery, Leber says.

Listen to your body and remember that your ideal workout recovery strategy will ebb and flow over weeks, months, and years.