The theory behind training and recovery boils down to this: you stress your body and it responds by fortifying its resources to better handle the stress. You put strain on your muscles by lifting weights, but your body fixes the minor damage by reinforcing the muscle fiber to be stronger. How quickly your body rebounds from the strain of training depends on the amount of stress you experience along with your body’s available resources.
Imagine your body is a house and training is the weather. Initially, you make your first house out of straw. Some wind comes along and blows the walls down. If you have the resources, you replace them with brick walls. Now when the next bout of weather comes along, your walls are more resilient and stronger. Similarly, as you continue to train, you increase your training load (aka exposure to more extreme weather) by lifting more, running faster, throwing more pitches etc. This increased stress will cause minor damage but your body will repair the damage with upgrades (i.e double pain windows, fire proof shingles etc – you get the idea) so you can handle even more bad weather.
This storm/repair/repeat cycle is the mechanism by which you get fitter, stronger and faster.
Your training results are only as good as the recovery that follows each vigorous workout. Your body will rebuild to be even stronger if the recovery is done correctly. Just like a house, your body’s level of fit will be determined by the quality of repairs you make in between storms.
Rest is our body’s natural recovery system and blood is probably the most important element of recovery from training stress. Blood shuttles metabolic waste products out and brings the inflammatory molecules to help with repairs to the area in need. It delivers protein, oxygen and glucose to the muscles so they can repair and refuel. Basically, blood delivers all of the agents of recovery to our body.
What does blood have to do with Atlanta Sports Recovery? Well, this is where our recovery sessions come into play. All of the modalities (heat, cold, compression, e-stem etc) we use in a recovery session, help increase blood flow. This ultimately means you will recover better and faster so you can handle more stress and have more effective training sessions.
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