"Wherever you look online, the emphasis is always on training hard, which is great and I love seeing people training hard. But the harder you train, the harder you must recover."
I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'muscles aren't built in the gym' and whilst we might be creating the stimulus to build muscle in the gym, the key to progress beyond this initial stimulus is ensuring that you have the ability to recover from the stress of the stimulus you have placed your body under in the gym.
How can you improve your recovery?
Nobody wants to hear that the secret to improving your physique is by starting with a foundation of high quality macronutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. It’s just not groundbreaking (hopefully) or particularly interesting, but if these foundations aren't in place, none of the other fancy strategies and techniques will be as effective and you’ll be wasting your time, money, and effort.
The quality of nutrients we fuel our bodies with has a significant impact on recovery and potential for changing our body composition, whether that be fat loss and/or muscle gain. Particular emphasis needs to be placed on adequate protein consumption (shocker) when it comes to recovery. For most my recommendation is to aim for 1g of protein per pound of body weight (there are exceptions to this).
Alongside quality nutrition, comes an equally exciting and glamorous topic, sleep. Quality sleep must become a priority if you want to maximise your recovery and results. A lack of quality sleep will not only impede your recovery and make it more difficult to build muscle and lose fat, but it has been shown to have detrimental effects on just about every facet of life.
As we sleep our body produces its highest amount of growth hormone, repairs various functions within the body, and allows the nervous system to recover, which is essentially your body's electrical wiring (it's kind of a big deal).
If you want to get in the best shape possible then recovery is essential and you should be putting as much effort into prioritising it as you do with your training sessions.
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