Post-exercise recovery: time for a hands-on approach!

Rapid recovery is a fundamental pre-requisite for success in high-level sport. In short, the faster you recover, the sooner you’ll be fresh and ready to perform quality training again. This in turn means you can perform more high-quality training sessions within a given time period, thereby greater training adaptations. This need for rapid recovery is particularly relevant when athletes needed to train more than once daily. It’s also essential when athletes compete in multi-round events during a single day – eg heats/rounds in an athletic or swimming competition.

The essentials of recovery

The speed and completeness of post-exercise recovery involves a number of factors, which include:

·        The athlete’s nutrition immediately after and in the hours following the exercise bout (absolutely critical – see this article for a more in-depth discussion).

·        How hard/long the bout of exercise was.

·        The amount of post-exercise rest taken by the athlete.

·        The athlete’s individual characteristics – eg age (older athletes need more time to recover), previous training history (well-trained muscles can recover faster) and genetic makeup.

Of these factors, the most easily modifiable are post-exercise nutrition and rest activity. But while ample rest and optimum nutrition are incredibly powerful tools for ensuring rapid and full recovery, they are by no means the only tools in the box. It turns out that there are a number of other post-exercise therapeutic strategies that can enhance and speed up recovery. These include massage and foam rolling, stretching, and small amounts of low-intensity targeted exercise, more commonly known as ‘active recovery’.

Cooling for recovery

Another recovery tool in the box – and one that has become increasingly popular – is the use of post-exercise cooling techniques to encourage beneficial physiological changes in the muscles. Of these methods, cold water immersion (CWI - which involves the athlete immersing themselves for a period of time in cold water (typically around 10-13C [50-55F]) right after training or competition) is probably the most popular and best researched.

The theory behind CWI after exercise is that it decreases the body’s core temperature to below its baseline level, with a peak drop in core temperature occurring around an hour following immersion. This cooling effect has been shown to help repair exercise-induced muscle damage, with a larger effect for weight-bearing (running and strength training) compared with non-weight-bearing activities^(1,2).

There are a number of variations of cooling strategies other than CWI. These include contrast water therapy (cool water immersion interspersed with short periods of warm water immersion), very low temperature cold-air cryotherapy, wind cooling or using specialized cooling garments worn on the body to rapidly lower post-exercise temperatures. However, a very recently published meta-study bringing together all the previous data on these cooling/recovery methods found that when it came to recovering from muscle soreness, CWI was superior to all the other recovery methods⁽³⁾. And for the recovery of muscular power and flexibility following a bout of strenuous exercise, CWI was similar to cryotherapy and more effective than active recovery, contrast water therapy and warm-water immersion.

The problem with CWI

If cold water immersion is such an effective recovery tool, why isn’t it used all the time and by all athletes? The answer is simple – convenience, or rather lack of it. The fact is that jumping into a bath of cold water right after training or competition simply isn’t feasible or practical for most athletes! Firstly, you have to have access to a bathtub and water, and secondly, you may well need to cool this water in summer as it could be significantly warmer than 13C (55F) when it emerges from the tap. Then of course, there’s the inconvenience and time taken, and the fact that when you’re away from home, it’s not even possible. Finally, while effective, the mere thought of plunging into a bath of pretty cold water is distinctly unappealing to many!

There are other cooling options, which have been shown to be quite effective in promoting recovery such as the use of a large wind fan directed on the chest combined with intermittent water spraying to promote evaporative cooling⁽⁴⁾. However, this leads to similar problems regarding practical application – how do you carry a large wind fan to an event and plug it into a mains electricity source immediately after an event?