Post-Active Recovery Routine

Post-active recovery is a necessary part of any active, sports or exercise routine. Your post-active recovery routine has an immense impact on your performance and allows you to train, exercise or compete more effectively. Post-active recovery involves performing low-intensity exercise following a strenuous workout, such as walking, swimming or yoga which is considered more beneficial than inactivity. 

Recovery aims to restore physiological and psychological processes, in order for us to move, live, play and compete again at a suitable level. Our body’s muscle needs anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to repair and rebuild, and returning too soon will lead to tissue breakdown instead of building. Quality of performance is affected by numerous influences and therefore consideration of adequate recovery methods need to be taken into account.

My strongest recommendation, based on 26 years of experience working with athletes from all backgrounds and abilities is to allow the body to go through its natural inflammatory process whilst incorporating your post recovery routine. Allowing your body that natural time for recovery has proven to be better for maintaining and developing healthier soft tissue and connective tissue integrity.

Sore, tender and achy muscles are your body’s way of telling you that it’s recovering from the stresses you just put it through. Recovery research is a relatively new area for sports scientists and forever being updated. Recovery strategies such as hydrotherapy, low intensity active movement, massage, compression garments, stretching or various combinations of these methods may have value as recovery enhancing strategies. Importance should also be placed on nutrition and adequate sleep to maximize recovery and reduce fatigue.

Some Methods to Boost Recovery:

• Hydrotherapy (Pool Session or Contrast Hot and Cold Therapy)
• Active Recovery 
• Yoga Movement and Stretching
• Compression Garments used in Conjunction with Freemove Muscle Recovery Creams
• Massage or Manual Therapy using organic Freemove Muscle Recovery Creams
• Sleep, Nutrition and Hydration

A few of my favourite recovery methods used over the years are massage, cold water therapy and compression garments used with my personally developed organic and natural Freemove Muscle Recovery Creams.