What Is A Recovery Workout?

In my ask a question thread someone inquired about recovery workouts and do you need them. Let’s start with defining an active recovery workout.

Definition: Active recovery workouts are low intensity and low volume workouts in which the goal is to get blood into the muscles that you worked the day before to enhance recovery. In addition, another goal with active recovery is to loosen up stiff muscles.

You want to keep your active recovery workouts to once or twice a week so that the bulk of your week is designed around your intense sessions (weights, interval workouts, HIIT sessions, high-intensity cardio classes). Here are some basic guidelines for a recovery workout:

1. Keep them to one hour or less.

2. Keep them low intensity…less than 65% of your target HR max. Remember, your body gets leaner, stronger, and build muscle tissue only when it has proper rest. If you don’t rest you don’t improve so a recovery workout needs to be low intensity.

3. If doing strengthening exercises, do body weight only work.

Examples of good active recovery workouts are:

1. Walking, jogging, and biking at 55-65% of your target HR Max.

2. Yoga or pilates classes that are low intensity or designed for beginners. Both will provide good stretching and get good blood flow to the muscles.

3. A full-body weight only routine. Most beginners should not do this type of routine for active recovery but seasoned exercisers can add in a short, full body routine like:

- 20 squats
- 20 lunges each leg
- 10 pull-ups
- 10-20 push-ups
- 20 wide leg squats
- 20 closed leg squats
- 25 sit ups
- 20 leg throws
- 15 dips

Doing one set of each of these with a 1 minute break in-between for the seasoned fitness person is a good way to get a light workout to the muscled during active recovery. You could do this once a week on your off day followed by 30 minutes of easy walking.

Does everyone need to do this workout? No. If you are the kind of person who needs to establish the habit of working out and taking one day off a week might derail you, YES, schedule a walk or something on off days to keep you moving. On the other hand, if you just like to move everyday then active recovery is also good for you. Most people prefer to just rest on days off and that’s great, too. The key is to avoid pushing your body to the max every day so that you can make gains in your fitness.

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Daily Workout: Cardio 20 minutes of walking at 65% and heavy back day. The routine consisted of several sets of bentover smith machine rows with a wide over handed grip, bentover rows on the smith machine with an underhanded grip, low back pulls on the cables, single arm rear delts on teh pec dec, and assisted wide grip pull ups. Again, I didn’t keep track of sets and reps. Today was about just doing enough sets and reps to failure or near failure with a heavy weight. Most sets were 4-6 with 6-10 reps.

Daily Food:

B – oatmeal with 1/2 serving yogurt
S – EAS shake, hard boiled egg, 1/2 cantaloupe
L – baked potato, chicken salad, green beans
S – protein shake with pbutter, pro powder, 1/2 serving of yogurt, ice, and splash of milk
D – Mahi Mahi, green beans, pinto beans, asparagus, and broc
S – hard boiled egg and protein shake