Episode #349: 5 Tips for Recovering from Soreness

Hey, beautiful people. How are you? I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Thank you so much for pressing play and for joining me totally feeling froggy today. You hear it in my voice. It is not first thing in the morning, I just have this kind of like fogginess going on. So sorry about that in advance. But we’re here nonetheless. And we’re getting it done. So today, as you saw, we are talking about tips for recovering from soreness. Now, interestingly, I feel like I’ve touched on this in a couple Q and A’s but I don’t think I’ve ever had an episode dedicated to this. However, I It’s like shameful that over, I don’t know, 300 episodes or whatever. We I’ve not talked about this because I get this question so much. Usually when I get it is like week, day five of the eight week program. When we do our eight week Fat Loss Challenge. It’s always the end of that first week, I asked for a check in. And it’s not a question on there, you know, I have different, you know, questions that I prompt the participants and all of you who have done it and know this, and I always have a part for questions and truly like it has come up. I’m not exaggerating at least 100 times out of like the hundreds of ladies who have gone through the program who have asked, what what do I do for soreness? Like, I’m really dying here, what do I do for soreness and now I started including it as part of like the week one kind of package of like and anticipate some soreness and here’s what to do, but I figured we could talk about it today, with all of you who have maybe not done a challenge with me or who maybe when we did you have not been sore and now you’re up leveling your workouts, all different things like there’s you know, lots of different reasons that we are sore right now. I am in my third trimester of pregnancy and my workouts are not as intense as they are when I’m not in my third trimester of pregnancy. So chances are once I you know, have the baby and hopefully I’m cleared and everything looks good after this baby. You know that when I get back to working out, after all the core rebuilding and everything that I’m going to do because I take my time and do things smart and strategically. But when I when I get back into some lifting workouts, I’m sure I’m going to be sore. Like there’s all different reasons why we might or sometimes, you know when I’m not pregnant, but I’m working out regularly. And I just really up level a workout or do something I haven’t done in a while, you know, muscles that we haven’t had are actually the most recent time I can remember being sore. I was pregnant I was early on in the first trimester and my sister and I went and took a self defense class. And I love doing kind of, you know, sometimes you’ll see in the hit portions, the chasing greenness group or the eight week challenge I’ll use like jabs and uppercuts and knees because those are low impact high intensity cardio moves. But I don’t typically like hit a bag, everyone to the self defense message was awesome. But we were like work, you know, hitting on the bags, and we practice like chasing each other with shields like you had to fight off the shield, you know. And the next day I woke up and we both talk to each other. We’re like, are you sore? Are you oh my goodness, like these are muscles I’m not using so long, the twisting in the whatever, like I trained my lats but something was awake back there that I have not used in a long time. So sorry, this happens. Okay, let’s get into ways that we can mitigate it. And hopefully recover faster so that we can come back to our next workout or our next training session. So number one is to hydrate. Water goes a long way in both preventing but also then helping out soreness to kind of flush the body and we obviously don’t over hydrate, I always recommend 80 to 100 ounces of water. So I’d shoot to get that. And you know, our bodies are made up of a big portion of water. So just making sure that we’re doing everything that we can to keep our systems firing and doing what they need to do so that our body can recover just helps the process a lot. Tip number two is to get your protein in protein is very big for muscle recovery. This is another one that we can be proactive about making sure I honestly often do and a lot of even if you’ve done my YouTube workout videos, a lot of times I’m like Alright, have a great rest of your day, get some protein and get some water see later. You’re like I do say that a lot of the end of it to like yes, go get protein and protein and actually, if it’s right after immediately after your workout carbs can also help a muscle recovery and tap your glycogen stores back off if you just depleted them from your workout, especially if it was an intense one. But protein is going to help your muscles recover and get ready for their next round. Because when we’re working out specifically when we’re lifting weights or doing strength training, whether it’s your body weight or bands or TRX or any anything like that, we are actually ripping the muscle fibers so that they grow back stronger. So they need the support of water and protein to be able to repair themselves. Oh, did I even put this on here? I was just gonna say in sleep, I don’t have sleep unless, probably because all of you want to hit me over the head when I tell you to sleep, because it’s such a big pillar of help of health rather. But a lot of times, there’s just so much out of our control that it’s like, yes, Bernie, I would love to sleep seven to nine hours a night. But that’s not always the case. So I get that. And I’m not going to harp on this day. But that should be out there because water, protein and sleep is definitely what AIDS muscle recovery the most. But I won’t beat the the horse today about sleep. So tip number three, if you’re super sore, like this is like you woke up. You’re like this ship has sailed. Maybe you got protein and maybe you didn’t but you still are sore. Maybe you hydrated. Maybe you didn’t, you’re still really sore. Okay, tip number three is to move your body now. No, I don’t want you to work out a particular muscle group that sore say you just did arms yesterday, and your biceps are so sore like you feel like you can’t even straighten your arm out. Because it feels like tight and like you’re still holding a dumbbell there. You’re not going to go train arms today. Okay, you need at least today to recover. So I don’t mean go do some bicep curls. What I do mean is go for a walk, let your arm swing by their sides. You know when your legs are really so we usually want to avoid moving, we’re sore because we feel it. You know if our glutes are really sore, our quads, the front of our thighs. But if you really tight and sore, we don’t want to walk upstairs because like oh, we’re even downstairs. What is best for you right now is to go for a walk to get on the elliptical or the treadmill or something where or a bike like a light stationary bike, don’t crank up the resistance, which might you know, push the muscles too much. But just break it up, break up the soreness get the blood flow going. Sending blood to those muscles is what’s going to help them recover faster. So it’s actually really good to break it up. The next day, there’s been times like I’ve said myself, or I’ve heard clients say, Oh man, like there’s one hike, we like to do close to our house that has a lot of stairs. And I’ve said that before to my husband like oh man after a leg day like this, but it’s actually the best thing that you can do. Not too much. Again, like stairs can be a little bit resistance training ish. But walking in particular is great. Okay, two more practical tips to recover from soreness and get moving faster is Epsom salt baths. This is usually when I do share this with people who ask whether it’s been a challenge or somebody just DMS means I was like, Hey, how do I combat the soreness, I usually share the first couple of tips. And then I’m like, but if you’ve got extra time or or if you’re a little bougie like do this because I get it. Baths just sometimes seem like a luxury that we do not have again all the time for but Epsom salt is shown and there’s research to it, helping your muscles to recover faster. So if you have you know, an extra 20 minutes that you can soak in there, that is going to give you a lot of bang for your buck for that a little bit of time. Okay, last one, in recovering from muscle soreness, this is not really going to help you the day of but kind of just a mentality to have, especially if you really don’t like being sore, because some people enjoy it. And they’re like, Oh, good, you know, I work that some people are very turned off by it and don’t like feeling like that. So they don’t want to work out again, they don’t want to be like that. So my last tip for you is to actually stay consistent. It is very hard to keep confronting the same soreness and you’re not going to push through it unless you actually get a regular workout routine going. Because if you’re doing the like once every couple of weeks workout thing, then you are going to stay in that pattern of being really sore. Doing nothing for a while working out being really sore, doing nothing for a while. So it’s kind of something else I have to push through and work through. Like I mentioned, don’t work out a muscle group on a still sore and sometimes when you’re newer to something, you’re gonna stay sore longer. Even the other day I hadn’t done split body part workouts in a while I’ve been doing a lot of full body workouts, but I went to film for the chasing greatness group. And we had to do kickstand RDLs, which is basically a one legged RDL kind of and my hamstrings were sore for like five days like I’m not getting five to seven days. We’re usually if I do legs, I can turn around do legs again and two or three days.

So if that is happening, you know where you just really went hard in the paint one day you don’t want to like I said work that same muscle group resistance wise. You want to be able to let it heal, get blood flow to it, do the like cardio, whatever to break it up. But don’t strength train it again. So you’re gonna get yourself in a pickle. If you work out like once a week and everything’s still sore for a whole week. Then you can’t Train again, like you got to just try to get in a pattern where I do recommend at least three times a week doing strength training. And that’s going to also probably help keep you just feeling good all the time not debilitating, debilitating soreness, after workout. All right, I hope that’s helpful and that you could just start applying it right now. I tried to make it so next episode we’re talking about reframing how you look at food and looking at what you can and should eat versus what you cannot eat and talk about some examples of that too. I have a freebie for you from that episode. So stay tuned for that and I will talk to you then have a great rest of your day.

Time stamps: