Post-Workout Recovery Routines

I talk a lot about working out and sharing exercises you can use to optimize your time in the gym without hurting yourself here and on the CHEK Blog, but not so much about what to do/not to do about your post-workout recovery routine.

You need to be just as deliberate and mindful about your approach to post-workout recovery routines as you would be following good form exercising in the gym.

After three deep weeks of sharing philosophies, prayers and archetypes, I share some tips I use and recommend in this week’s blog/vlog, part of a much longer and recent Q&A with Penny on my Living 4D podcast.

We started with addressing a listener’s question about the timing of doing a post-workout cold plunge in relation to the body’s hormone response.

I’ve been advocating cold water therapies long before anybody was talking about them, and have never seen them do anything but good. Any blunting of hormones you may see or read merely comes from someone’s fantasies.

Another important thing I recommend to my students and clients after their workouts is to get some real food into your body as quickly as you can, not packaged, poisoned crap that’s labelled “recovery foods.”

When you’re exercising hard, your muscles get hungry which is why I recommend that you eat one step above your body’s normal intake of carbohydrates.

If you typically eat a 50-50 mix of plant and flesh foods, I would step up your intake to 70 percent flesh foods or add a piece of fruit to that 50-50 mix.

Here’s why: Because your insulin levels rise after a workout, the insulin traveling through your body will pack this extra nutrition into your working cells while they’re hot. Don’t wait too long after your workout to eat, or you’ll “wear” that food as fat.

In fact, I recommend that my clients bring food with them to the gym to eat after their workouts. When I was regularly working with kettlebell expert Mike Salemi, he would bring cheesecake or a healthy ice cream. He did that for inspiration to work really hard.

Eating good food, then topping it off with some healthy sweet food boosted Mike’s insulin levels which moved the glycogen from the bloodstream into his muscles as quickly as possible.

In this video, Penny and I also talk about the importance of passive rest versus active rest and staying in touch with the Pain Teacher at all times. Your goal should always be to improve at least 1 percent between workouts, as the late Charlie Francis preached.

If you don’t feel you can accomplish this, you don’t belong in the gym. You should go home and rest or do some kind of self-care like a massage.

Love and chi,

Paul