Now, the program to help you and your family get fit and stay fit with a biblical foundation
without a one size fits all plan.
It's Faith Family Fitness with your host, full armor sports and national champion coach,
Jason Lupo.
All right, welcome back to Faith Family Fitness on 100.7 The Word.
Today's topic is going to be recovery.
We're going to talk about recovering after fitness and keeping a healthy lifestyle that
allows us to continue to train, to continue to compete, to make sure that we're able to
reach our peak performance.
And recovery is a critical aspect of performance and it's a critical aspect of our everyday
lives.
We need to make sure that we are recovered enough to hit it again tomorrow to be able
to compete or train tomorrow or even to continue to work at an extraordinary focus and effort.
If we're not recovered, we're going to struggle the next day and the following day.
And so recovery is a hot topic in sport.
It's a critical focus more so than it's ever been is how do we improve recovery techniques?
How do we make sure that we're recovered enough to continue to perform at a peak level?
So that's the topic on today's show.
Hang with us.
We're going to take a brief time out and then we will come back and discuss everything recovery.
Thanks for listening to Faith Family Fitness, a presentation of full armor sports teams.
Teamwork is at the core of any successful organization.
Full armor sports led by national champion coach Jason Lupo is now registering for school
year sports programs.
Full armor is a multi-sport teaching and training organization with home school options
available.
All of full armor sports coaches are certified and experts in their field.
Full armor's coaches combine for over 500 years of coaching experience.
They will help your kids gain fundamental skills.
The concepts of teamwork is essential to being successful throughout their lives.
Multiple sports options are available now from swimming, softball and volleyball to
powerlifting and youth MMA.
The faith-based approach to making sports fun and productive are a great choice for
your kids at full armor sports teams.
Learn more at fullarmorsportsteams.com.
Welcome back to Faith Family Fitness on 100.7 the Word.
Exercise topic recovery.
So we've talked a lot, if you haven't heard, you can go back and listen to previous episodes.
We've talked a lot about training and we've talked a lot about how to structure a training
program.
We've talked about exercise selection.
Last week we talked about heart rate zones and endurance training.
But there's a critical aspect when it comes to all training and that is recovery.
We need to make sure that our bodies are recovered from a day to day basis in order to continue
to train.
And if we get to a point where we are no longer recovering well, we can't train as hard and
we set ourselves up for risk of injury.
And so everybody's a little bit different.
And you know, we've talked a lot about individualization as well on this program.
I have athletes that can go really hard for a solid six weeks and then need a little bit
of a break.
And then I've got athletes that their period of time might only be four weeks.
And especially in endurance training when I was working with cyclists that were riding
tons of miles every single week and training a lot every single day, that understanding
recovery and how much total volume they could take before they needed a rest week or a
reduced week of volume, that was critical.
And a lot of times in my swimmers, it's looking right.
You can see the difference.
You can see when they need a break.
And so the other day I gave my advanced group of my swimmers a break because you could just
tell that they needed that little bit of rest.
And so as a coach, we have to look at it and we have to look at our athletes and go, okay,
we need to dial back a little bit here or increase the volume and the tempo here.
And we have to be fluid and flexible.
When it comes to you and your own body, that's your determination of your recovery level.
And what I've always told athletes, especially adult athletes and kids that are going to
high school or colleges, we're looking at a cumulative total stress.
So there's you stress, good stress, distress, bad stress, but the cumulative volume of good
and bad stress impacts our day to day lives.
So even though training and sport can be good stress, what we call you stress, at the same
time there's the work life balance that can sometimes also creep in and that stress.
And the number one thing that people are stressing about in this country is money.
And so the stress of money, the stress of fiscal resources can also take a huge toll
on your own health and the need for recovery.
So even if you're increasing your training, you're increasing the good stress, if the
bad stress in your life is also increased, your cumulative stress is going to be higher
and you're going to have a greater need for recovery.
And that comes back to lack of focus.
It comes back to muscle fatigue, soreness, you know, lots of things can be impacted health
wise from stress.
It's a huge component of heart disease, high blood pressure, stress in the bad ways can
make a huge difference in your health.
And so we have to realize that.
But going back to exercise, when we lift, when we run, when we do all that stuff, we're
creating micro tears in the muscle.
We're creating micro tears in the muscle, we are, you know, increasing muscle power,
increasing muscle strength, there's a lot going on in the nervous system.
The nervous system can be taxed and start to slow down.
And so we have to look at ways to increase recovery.
And when we talked about the super compensation model, a number of weeks back, what happens
is we break down our body, we break down our body and we go below baseline, right?
So baseline level performance, we break down our body and then we recover.
And what happens is, is during the recovery, we actually get better than the baseline and
you continue to do this and you break down the body and you let it recover and you start
moving the baseline up in terms of performance, up and up and up and up and up.
And so the recovery aspect is the critical component.
So there's two critical components.
The first is we have to have enough stress to cause adaptation, which we talked about
in week one, you have to have enough stress to cause adaptation, then you have to have
enough recovery to allow the body to adapt.
And so there's this fine balance.
For beginner athletes, people that are just starting to work out in the gym, that stress
required to create adaptation is small and the recovery time tends to be smaller.
And as you get more and more advanced, as you become more and more strong or faster,
the amount of stress required to create adaptation is greater and the time to recover tends to
be a little bit longer.
And so we use the periodization model, which in some sports we utilize and other sports
we don't, but you use the periodization model and you go, okay, we're going to build up
stress, build up stress, build up stress, build up stress, and then we're going to allow
the body to recover.
And when we allow the body to recover, we get stronger and faster.
And so that is the science in a very layman's terms as to what is happening and what's required
to continue to get better in our exercise, in our sport, running, cycling, whatever it
is, enough stress to create adaptation, enough recovery to allow the adaptation to occur.
And so we talked about that.
Now we got to talk about what does recovery look like.
And there's a couple elements to recovery.
The first is your day-to-day recovery.
And the next is kind of like this long-term recovery, right?
Long-term stuff that we do to kind of speed up recovery that we might not do every day.
And so on a daily basis, one of the biggest components is food, nutrition.
So when we talk about recovery nutrition, when you're working out, you're actually depleting
the glycogen levels in your body.
That's your fast-acting fuel.
So think carbohydrates.
And so there's arguments as to what creates soreness in the body, what creates that DOMS
delayed onset muscle soreness, where you're sore two days later.
And there's some science that goes to say that a lot of soreness has to do with lack
of fuel uptake, like renewal of that fuel.
And then there's others that say, well, no, it's the actual breaking down of the muscle
fibers that creates the soreness.
And so there's kind of debate there.
But we do know that we deplete our glycogen stores, especially at high-intensity exercise.
So we talked about heart rate zones, where you have your anaerobic system and your aerobic
system.
Your anaerobic system, which is that higher heart rate stuff, where anaerobic is without
the presence of oxygen.
We talked about this last week.
Without the presence of oxygen, you are burning carbohydrates, muscle glycogen, as a primary
source of fuel.
So with high-intensity exercise, we deplete those glycogen stores.
Immediately after exercise, we want to replenish that glycogen stores.
So we're looking at carbohydrates being increased.
After exercise, we have a spike in insulin.
When we have a spike in insulin, we are in a better place to synthesize protein.
So we are in a special place where we can better synthesize protein.
So increasing our protein content immediately after a workout with our carbohydrate, immediately
after a workout, will allow our body to better build up muscle.
It'll better allow that protein to break down and resynthesize amino acids coming together,
which is the building blocks of protein, in order to recover our muscles faster and actually
grow muscle.
And growing muscle is once again a layman term.
There's things that go on when it comes to what we consider muscle growth or hypertrophy,
which we're not really talking about today.
We're just talking about recovery.
So a number of years ago, there was a huge kind of hot buzz about this three to one ratio
of carbohydrates to protein, and then as per usual marketing terminology, four to one ratio
became the better process, whatever.
Three to one, four to one.
I don't know if there's enough science to really prove that one is better, but people
started creating recovery drinks, and basically it was a three to one ratio of carbohydrates
to protein.
And there was science behind this idea of a 30 minute recovery window, which was immediately
after exercise, you have this 30 minute window where your body is set up to naturally receive
nutrients after the workout.
And so there was this idea that, and I still believe in the 30 minute recovery window,
I believe that it exists.
I believe that all these things happen in the body.
So I instruct my athletes to eat immediately after a workout too.
But there's this 30 minute window where if we consume protein and carbohydrates, our
body is better adapt to receive them and to use them to restore muscle glycogen levels
and build proteins.
So we know that, all right, we know that's what's probably occurring in the body.
There was a large amount of research that said that you can extend this recovery window
to two hours if you consume a carbohydrate protein snack or drink right after the workout.
So what that allows is that says, okay, you get done with your workout in the gym, you
consume some sort of muscle recovery, carbohydrate protein snack or drink.
And now that muscle recovery window has been increased to two hours, which then allows
you to drive home, cook dinner, eat dinner, and all of that stuff is better being utilized
by the body.
So that's the recovery research from a nutrition standpoint.
Then we go into hot cold therapy.
Now the way that the body works, you have blood vessels, okay.
We have vasoconstriction, which is the blood vessels narrowing and we have vasodilation,
which is the blood vessels increasing in size, dilating, getting bigger.
And so when you have heat, our blood vessels increase.
We have vasodilation.
With cold, we have vasoconstriction.
So the blood vessels are getting tighter.
And what that does is when you're cold and you're outside, you notice your hands are
the first thing that gets cold.
Our blood vessels constrict to keep blood at the center of the body to keep it warm.
When we're in a hot, humid place, let's say you're in Florida in July, our blood vessels
are going to dilate.
They're going to get bigger, which allows more blood to get to the surface and expel
the heat from the body.
So that's what we're looking at when we talk about hot and cold therapy.
The latest research in the last 15, 20 years has been heavily focused on this idea of contrast
therapy.
And if you listen to a lot of other podcasts, if you listen to a lot of other shows on health,
contrast therapy has been a topic in conversation lately.
And so what you're essentially doing is you can do it with a hot, cold shower where people
are doing a hot shower and then immediately switching it back to cold and then a hot shower
and back to cold.
If you're in a position where you can use two tubs, like a hot tub and ice bath, that's
also been used to do this contrast therapy.
And the idea is you're basically creating a pump.
So you're opening the blood vessels, you're constricting them, you're opening them, you're
constricting them.
And when you open the blood vessels, you have this rush of blood into the area and then
you constrict it and you're pushing the blood back towards the center of the heart.
And so plenty of different protocols as to how long you're supposed to sit in the cold
versus the hot.
You can do a quick Google search, find all the information you'd ever want to know on
contrast therapy.
In our programs, we use compression therapy a lot.
Normatec boots kind of took off.
There's a ton of other places that sell compression boots.
Back when I was an athlete, compression clothing was a big thing.
So we had compression leggings and compression arm wear.
And basically what it was trying to do was push all the blood back towards the center.
It helps kind of the vasculature, those veins to pump the blood back towards the heart.
So basic anatomy, arteries away, veins back too.
So our arteries are pushing blood away from the heart.
Our veins are bringing it back towards the heart.
And when you look at something like legs, okay, we have gravity that is basically our
body has to overcome gravitational forces with that blood to push it back towards the
heart.
So compression therapy, the idea was that you're basically assisting the blood back
to the center.
With compression boots like Normatec boots, they're inflating segmentally, pushing blood
back towards the heart, which also carries that lactate metabolic waste from the exercises
that we just finished.
Another thing that was popular for a long time is just putting your legs up.
So if you scoot close to a wall, put your legs up on the wall, you're assisting the
blood to come back to the center of the body, working in very similar fashion.
Massage does the same thing where basically you're working on blood flow.
So a lot of it, a lot of the recovery processes are focused on blood flow, right?
Either bringing blood to an area or pushing blood back towards the heart to get rid of
metabolic waste.
So that's what we're looking at with recovery.
Cryotherapy is the same thing.
Basically you create this giant vasoconstriction, all the blood comes back to the center of
the body and as you warm up, blood rushes back, fresh oxygenated blood rushes back into
the area and basically helps to pump that blood back towards the center of the body.
So we're really looking at blood flow as to the exact physiological occurrence of what
happens during that blood rush.
That's kind of up to debate as well in terms of what does the science actually say is happening,
but we know that it's creating better recovery for athletes.
Napping is huge, especially for athletes doing two a days.
Taking a nap in the middle of the day has been found to be a great recovery tool.
And also sleep, sleep's just very important.
Sleep is one of the most critical components of recovery for athletes and people who are
working out, who also are working full time job, going to school full time.
Sleep is critical to the recovery of the brain, but also the body.
And we know that, we know that we need our sleep, we know that we need to get the eight
hours of sleep, but very few people do.
So we've talked a lot about what we can do to recover the body.
The last thing that we have to talk about is how do we tell when we need extended recovery?
And so one of the big things that we talked about last week is looking at resting heart
rate with Fitbits and things like that becoming more popular and people sleeping with those
devices becomes a little bit easier to track recovery.
So if you have a giant increase, and giant, I'm talking like, you know, six, 10% increase
in your resting heart rate.
So let's say your resting heart rate's normally 50 and all of a sudden your resting heart
rate is now 58.
That's a really good indicator that something's up.
Maybe you're getting sick, you need a little bit of recovery, your body's not recovering
as well.
And so that is when that's a key critical indicator that we need to take a little bit
of extended recovery.
The other thing is just speed, right?
Speed, the weight on the bar.
If you can't lift what you were lifting, right?
What you've been comfortably lifting and all of a sudden it becomes really hard, really
good chance you need some extended recovery.
Same with speed, right?
If you've been running nine minute miles and all of a sudden one day you can't touch that
nine minute clip, it's too difficult to maintain a nine minute mile.
Really good indicator, you need a little bit of rest and recovery.
So all of those key components, listening to your body as you become more and more trained
as you're further along in your fitness journey, further along in your athletic journey, you
start to realize when you need that recovery.
If you're working with a coach, a lot of times they can tell when you need that recovery.
Sometimes, right?
Going back to individualization, sometimes that means that your recovery period is a
week, right?
A week of easier workouts.
Sometimes it's three days.
Everybody's a little bit different.
Everybody needs a little bit different time in order to fully recover.
Sometimes it's just a couple of days.
And so all of that is something that you learn through experience of continually working
out and continually listening to your body and getting an understanding of what it is
that you need to do.
We're going to take a brief time out when we come back.
We will wrap things up.
Thank you for joining us.
Stay with us.
Thanks for listening to Faith Family Fitness, a presentation of full armor sports teams.
Teamwork is at the core of any successful organization.
At Full Armor Sports, led by national champion coach Jason Lupo, a Christ-centered approach
to sports fundamentals and fitness has earned his company the respect of athletes and their
parents.
Full Armor Sports is committed to helping youth in our community experience growth through
sports and to strive for improvement and excellence.
Further, youth compete as individuals coming together with a sense of teamwork, camaraderie,
and support for one another.
At Full Armor Sports, the reality is achievements, failures, wins and losses eventually fade
away.
But the bonds team members form through competition evolve into relationships lasting forever.
Learn more at FullArmorSports.com.
Thank you for joining us once again on Faith Family Fitness.
Today's topic was recovery, muscle recovery, recovering from exercise.
We talked about the fact that stress is cumulative, so your stress of working out plus your work
life balance or school life balance.
All of that stress is combined in terms of the impact to your body.
We talked about how to recover.
We talked about the importance of nutrition and recovery, making sure that we're eating
directly after exercise is a critical component.
Making sure we get enough sleep.
And then we talked about hot cold therapy and the impacts of hot cold therapy on recovery.
If you missed any part of this episode, you can go back.
You can listen to it on your favorite podcast provider, as well as all of our past episodes.
Make sure to join us on FaithFamilyFit.org to get more information.
You can also ask a question that we will answer on this show at questions at FaithFamilyFit.org.
Also, as always, if you have kids looking for a place to call their home for sports,
check us out at FullArmorSportsTeams.com.
Once again, Armour is the traditional spelling of Armour.
Thanks for joining us on Faith Family Fitness.
We are here every single Saturday at 9 a.m.
And we love to do this show.
We love to bring you different topics that apply to your life, your family, your health,
and your faith.
So, join us every week to catch more of this phenomenal information that we are looking
to share with you.
Thanks for joining us.
Hope to see you next Saturday.
This has been Faith Family Fitness with Coach Jason Lupo of FullArmor Sports Teams of Colorado
Springs.
Join him at the same time next week for Faith Family Fitness on the Word 100.7.