Coaches, trainers, and athletes are always talking about recovery and its impact on performance. No one likes being sore or exhausted all the time, so of course, we think recovery is important. We want a break every now and then! However, recovery is so much more than taking a break or getting a little more rest. Recovery is just as important as hard training, and we’ll tell you why!

Hard training is important, don’t get us wrong. In order to excel as an athlete, you need to push your physical limits regularly. The harder you push, the more important your recovery is.  You can only break your muscles down for so long. If you push yourself too hard for too long, you limit the benefits of hard training and eventually end up doing yourself more harm than good.

When we give our bodies time to recover, we allow our bodies to do so much more. Giving our bodies the opportunity to recover can have the following positive repercussions:

• Better sleep – A significant part of recovery is sleeping. Sleep gives our bodies the opportunity to rebuild muscle and replenish nutrients. When we skimp on our sleep, we’re ultimately reducing our body’s ability to recover! Sleep is detrimental to our recovery. Good recovery = Good sleep, and vice versa.
• Less soreness – Sore muscles are the worst! After a hard workout, the simplest tasks suddenly feel impossible. Recovery doesn’t prevent sore muscles. Let’s be honest, if you’re giving your best effort in training, sore muscles are inevitable. However, when we allow our bodies to recover, we give our muscles an opportunity to rebuild stronger than before and avoid that prolonged achiness.
• Less injury – As we said, when your muscles are sore and your body is tired, the simplest tasks suddenly feel impossible, including your regular training regime. If we don’t allow our bodies to recover, we force them to fight through a lot of lactic acid and discomfort. In short, when we don’t invest time in recovery, we build fatigue, and when we build fatigue, we lose efficiency and get sloppy, and that’s when it’s very easy to get injured. Recovery keeps our muscles fresh and keeps our bodies healthy and injury-free.
• Better training – If recovery helps us sleep better, have less soreness, and have less injury, recovery also helps us train better. Because our muscles and minds are fresh, we can give a better effort in practice and excel in our training. Simply put, you get more out of your training when you build regular recovery into your regime. Training hard is one thing.  We can all push ourselves to give our best effort no matter the outcome or what we feel like.  Training hard is not necessarily the key to success.  Training at Peak is where we make our greatest gains and to do this we need to invest in the recovery process.
• Better performance – We train hard with one main goal, to perform better! The better your recovery is, the more consistently you can train at a high level, and the more likely you are to experience better performance. Good recovery has numerous physical benefits, most of which ultimately lead to better performance.

Recovery is necessary for an athlete and crucial in reaching our ultimate goal of better performance. There are a lot of things you can do to help your body recover. Incorporate recovery days into practice, maintain proper nutrition, prioritize sleep, drink water and incorporate BODIMAX Sleeves into your training. What’s great about BODIMAX Sleeves is that they are meant to be worn during training.  Your muscles will not break down as much or be as fatigued as they may be without BODIMAX.  This has a proven impact on your rate of recovery.  

To sum it all up, recovery is a necessary counterpart to hard training and ultimately facilitates peak performance. Not to mention, you will feel better. Do yourself a favor and make recovery a priority in your training plan.