Optimizing Muscle Growth - Recovery
*This is not individualized medical guidance. Always consult a physician or other licesed healthcare professional when making changes to your diet, exercise routine, or putting this advice to action.
Recovery - Overview
This is by far the most important, impactful, and determining factor facilitating the muscle growth process. Unlike many of the false narratives surrounding muscle growth, the concept of muscle hypertrophy occurring mainly outside of the gym is mostly true (source). This means recovery encompasses everything you do outside of the time spent stimulating muscle growth. This includes but is not limited to sleep, stress, nutrition, auditory/visual stimuli, medications, and more.
If you’d like to read more on some of the basics when it comes to nutrition, check out chapter 5 of my free eBook here, or optimizing muscle growth – the current research on energy and protein
It’s important we also consider the variables within the workout that influence the duration of necessary recovery. These include volume, intensity, rest, load, and more. I touched a bit on these in my blog Optimizing muscle growth – Exercise Selection, but you can also find them in my previously mentioned free eBook. Finally, there are methods commonly used to hasten recovery. These include supplements, temperature-based exposure therapies (ie. sauna and cold plunges), light exposure, massage, foam rolling, cardiovascular exercise (active recovery), and more.
As you can see, recovery is a broad topic. Broad enough to span way more than one blog post and make it very challenging for me to focus on the main points. For efficiency’s sake, and to avoid giving any advice that should be given with individual context, I am going to leave out medications, nutrition, supplements, and some others. But still there are very important things to consider! Don’t worry, we will still go through some niche tools you can use to give you a recovery boost.
Sleep
One of the most important, yet neglected, aspects of recovery. A lack of sleep can lead to deficits in recovery capabilities either directly or indirectly. Directly, a lack of sleep affects hormones such as growth hormone and cortisol and can elevate pro-inflammatory cytokines, which can impede recovery from stress or exercise. Indirectly, sleep deprivation can impact motivation and decision making, making it harder to choose foods or adhere to habits that support recovery from exercise (read more 1, read more 2).
Okay, so it’s important. But how do we improve sleep? Well, there are 3 hormones in charge of your sleep. Adenosine, cortisol, and melatonin. There are ways to think about each that can help you design habits around sleep.
Adenosine
It’s hypothesized that adenosine is the cue for tiredness. Adenosine is a by-product of producing energy through adenosine triphosphate (the energy currency of our body). The brain is the most energy-demanding organ in the human body. This means as we think and move throughout the day we accumulate this hormone-like neurotransmitter leading to “sleep drive”.
Here’s a great article that sums up this concept.
Another important implication of adenosine is caffeine. Caffiene blocks adenosine receptors. So, although adenosine is accumulating throughout your day, your brain doesn’t recognize this until the caffeine is metabolized, which is what leads to “the crash” from coffee (read more).
Cortisol
Cortisol is our “stress” hormone, it’s responsible for kickstarting the energy-utilization process, making us feel alert, increasing our heart rate, and everything else not associated with sleeping or rest. But it’s also essential to stimulate muscle growth in the gym, so we don’t want to eliminate it completely.
However, optimizing our circadian rhythm requires cortisol is lower as we approach bedtime. To do this, setting the stage by having an abundance of cortisol in the morning is usually the recommendation. This means front-loading exercise, getting exposure to light in the morning (read more), or taking the time to practice strategies of lowering cortisol in the evening such as meditating, journalling, a gentle stretch, or others. These cortisol and stress-management strategies will be discussed more later in this blog.
Melatonin
Melatonin is by far the most famous sleep-related hormone. This is probably due to it’s commercial succes as a supplement. However, our body produces it’s own melatonin in the pineal gland, a small glad in the brain. Melatonin, much like adenosine, cues sleep. However, unlike adenosine, melatonin production is mostly stimulated by light, not physical/mental activity (read more). This provides the basis to seeking darkness in a sleeping environment and trying to follow the light-cycle produced by the sun.
A simplified graph of what the hormones that control sleep might look like throughout a normal day-night cycle
Food and Sleep
When you are building muscle and eating more than you normally might, it can be tough to squeeze all the nutrients you need for growth into a day. This often causes many to reach for larger meals before they sleep, to “catch up”.
When it comes to sleep, we have a natural 2-5 degree decline in body temperature that occurs before we sleep. Digesting large and complex meals going into these sleeping hours can prevent this decrease in body temp, which may negatively impact sleep. However, some research has found this to be a bit more complicated than expected. For example, eatin within an hour before sleeping could negatively impact the minutes you spend awake after sleeping, but also increase sleeping duration (read more 1, read more 2). This is likely a person-dependent effect, but generally it’s recommended to avoid complex and/or nutrient-dense meals within 3 hours prior to sleeping if possible and health-supporting.
Sleep Habits
These set the stage for some of the habits that you can use to help bank some more sleep drive to improve your sleep. Here’s a list from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine:
Keep a consistent sleep schedule. Get up at the same time every day, even on weekends or during vacations.
Set a bedtime that is early enough for you to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep.
Don’t go to bed unless you are sleepy.
If you don’t fall asleep after 20 minutes, get out of bed. Go do a quiet activity without a lot of light exposure. It is especially important to not get on electronics.
Establish a relaxing bedtime routine.
Use your bed only for sleep.
Make your bedroom quiet and relaxing. Keep the room at a comfortable, cool temperature.
Limit exposure to bright light in the evenings.
Turn off electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bedtime.
Don’t eat a large meal before bedtime. If you are hungry at night, eat a light, healthy snack.
Exercise regularly and maintain a healthy diet.
Avoid consuming caffeine in the afternoon or evening.
Avoid consuming alcohol before bedtime.
Reduce your fluid intake before bedtime.
Think about where you might be able to improve and set a goal! This can seem like a ton of things to worry about but picking 1 or 2 you think you have room to improve on can make this a much more digestible task.
Stress
Stress can be defined in many ways. I am sure for some the term brings memories of cramming for tests or work deadlines, having too much on your plate, or other stressful circumstances. Stress on a physiological level is hard enough to define, let alone how we each individually respond to stress and how it manifests in thought. For the context of this discussion, we will be considering biological stress defined within the limits of the endocrine system. Therefore, our definition encompasses the release of adrenal hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. However, if you’d like to read more on the definition of biological stress, check out this interesting read.
Stress can arise from a ton of stimuli, and it’s not inherently bad. We need a stress-response during exercise and life-threatening situations to increase our alertness and performance. However, the hormones associated with stress also downregulate some of the processes associated with muscle growth if they linger into the recovery period (read more).
Therefore, when optimizing muscle growth, where you want muscle growth and recovery to be the primary force outside of the gym, you simultaneously should be pursuing a lowering of stress outside of the gym.
This is much easier said than done. We all work, family, relationships, school, or other components of life that accumulate stress. But there are some proven ways to help lower stress outside of the gym context that can be useful tools when you are feeling more stressed than usual.
Extenal Stimuli
You might have noticed this discussion overlaps a lot with the previous topic, sleep. That’s because cortisol is also a by-product of light exposure and intense physical activity. However, it’s not just if we are being exposed to these things, but how. A great example of this is music, something that is associated with our stress response. Highly stimulating or intense music may exacerbate or replicate a stress-response, something you can read more about here.
This is why many bodybuilders are currently advocating for the use of stress-inducing music as a tool to surround your training times, and more calming or relaxing music outside of these training times.
Meditation and Journalling
Journalling is a tool that can be used to not only lower stress but help us process and understand it. This makes it easier to overcome. (read more)
The journal included in this study followed this guide:
Write three things for which you are grateful
Write the story of your life in six words
Write three wishes you have
But your journal could encompass other prompts and may be just as effective! There are plenty of free journal guides online. I always try to rotate my journal prompts so I can get exposed to different ways of thinking about stress.
Training Variables and Exercise Selection
Training closer to failure, as defined in optimizing muscle growth – exercise selection likely increases the time it takes to recover from resistance-based exercise. The same goes with volume. Exercises focusing on the lower body, multi-joint compound movements, eccentric contractions, and/or the lengthened position may require longer recovery times. A great way to go about this dilemma is to start at a lower volume, monitor your recovery, and increase gradually (source). Muscle recovery is individual, even on a muscle-to-muscle basis. So, learning how your body adapts to training different muscle groups at different intensities is essential to a personalized approach to recovery.
Cardiovascular Exercise
One of the myths around muscle-growth phases is that cardio should be cut completely. This (in my opinion) is far from the truth. Aerobic fitness is correlated with improved recovery from high intensity exercise (source). Also, “active recovery” has been shown to be just as effective as a cold-plunge when it comes to muscle recovery on the cellular level (source). In this study, 10mins of a “light” bout of exercise on a watt bike were performed and was found to be just as effective as 10 minutes of a common cold exposure therapy.
Cardiovascular exercise has also been proven to impact neurogenesis, improve working memory, relieve mental stress (as previously mentioned), and synthesize new blood vessels. This in the long term can help exacerbate the benefits of cardiovascular exercise on recovery (source 1, source 2).
Before you go running miles between lifts, there is a balance. High-intensity exercise, or very stressful exercise during a period of recovery from resistance training could impede the muscle-growth process. Based on the mechanisms of stress discussed earlier. So, it’s most likely best to include a low intensity aerobic exercise session after your session or between sessions to hasten recovery.
I hope this gives you some food-for-thought when it comes to your recovery. Remember, fitness is a huge and convoluted topic. Optimizing muscle growth takes time and practice. For some (including me), it takes years to incorporate some of these habits into daily life. So, cut yourself some slack and try to take reasonable bite-sized chunks out of the list of improvements you can make.
Thank you for joining me on this journey of optimizing muscle growth over the past couple months while I get ready to give another attempt at competing! If you haven’t checked out the previous blog posts, consider giving them a read and leaving any comments with feedback or ideas you have on recovery!
