Recovery 101- Sleep, Stress, Alcohol, Weekends, Lifestyle

Outside of training and nutrition, there is one other factor that can be make or break for your progress, and that’s recovery! Recovery basically covers everything you do outside of training in and of itself. Eating the right kinds and amounts of food obviously contributes to your recovery as well, but today we will be focusing on other factors outside of nutrition that when done well, can speed up your progress and make you feel a million bucks. But when done poorly, can either be a real speed bump for your progress or stop progress all together!

Sleep

Sleep is probably the most underrated aspect of recovery, we hear that it’s important every day, and yet most of us either don’t get enough of it, or just take a really nonchalant approach. There have been plenty of studies done on the effects of not getting enough sleep, with the common idea being that the less you get, the increase in negative side effects. It’s also something that can’t be “made up”, for example getting 5 hours sleep one night isn’t made up for by getting an extra few hours the next night. The side effects of a lack of sleep also aren’t felt instantly like the consequences of other factors, you’ll likely be able to mentally “push through” a poor sleep for some time, but the side effects will creep into your life.

Before we jump into the consequences of poor sleep and how you can improve it, let’s look at the benefits of having a good sleep routine and getting enough of it.

The benefits of sleep include

·         Increased productivity (in terms of work or study performance)

·         Better training performance (more reps, more stamina, higher chance to actually go at all)

·         Less hunger (Increased chance of sticking to your caloric needs)

·         Better mood (You’ll be nicer to be around)

You can basically flip those and find yourself the negative effects of poor sleep. So you’ll likely find yourself with decreased productivity, poor training performance, more cravings/hunger and worse moods. All things that will be detrimental to your training/aesthetic goals.

7 Hours sleep should be an achievable target for most people, 6 would be an absolute minimum and anything lower is where we see the negative effects of a lack of sleep come into play. If you think you are “too busy” to get enough sleep, remember there are CEOs of multibillion dollar companies who still say they prioritise getting at least 6-7 hours sleep because they know that any less will affect their performance. So, you can probably find it too. Not being able to sleep because of a lack of time is usually down to poor time management, not actually being too busy.

So how do we get better sleep? Well while generally all the hype surrounds a good morning routine, a good evening routine is the key to feeling refreshed in the morning from a good night’s sleep. If you barely scraped a couple of hours sleep, the best morning routine in the world won’t do much for you! Improved sleep will not happen as soon as changes are made. But if good sleep habits are maintained, sleep will certainly get better. With that being said, here are a few tips on improving the quality of your sleep:

· Try to wake up and go to sleep around the same time every day, even on weekends. This will help “set” your body clock and make it easier as time passes.

· Avoid spending too much time in your bed aside from when actually going to sleep. We want to enforce the habit that your bed is for sleeping, so avoid doing things like studying, working, watching TV or just lying in bed during the day.

· Try to ensure your room is at a comfortable temperature, dark enough and quiet. It can also help to invest in a comfortable mattress and pillow.

· Try not to engage in mentally stimulating activities close to bedtime. Use the last hour or so before sleep to relax your mind. Some things that you might find relaxing include having a warm bath/shower, reading quietly, or having a warm milky drink. This may seem obvious but avoid caffeine!

 Stress

Unless you have had the most chill life ever, stress is probably something you have had to deal with in the past. While for most of us some level of stress for a time is unavoidable, being chronically stressed will eventually lead to similar side effects as a lack of sleep when it comes to your fitness, these include decreased gym performance, irritability, and increased food cravings. Not to mention the general health problems which come along with consistent high stress levels.

Being able to manage your stress levels will not only mean you stay on top of your training and nutrition when life feels hectic, but also means you will better be able to stay on top of and balance other aspects of your life like work, relationships, family, and time management. While not all stress is avoidable, you may find that certain stressors in your life are in fact under your control. So not only is managing stress good for your training but also good for your life in general! With that being said, here are a few tips on staying on top of your stress levels:

· Remove yourself from stressful situations as much as possible, this may include certain environments or people. Learn to say no to people or situations that cause you stress.

· Having set parts of your day planned out for “down time”, when we are trying to relax while thinking about work or things we should be doing, stress simply builds. But if we have time planned out for relaxation then this can help as the relaxing is part of your plan for the day.

· Align your actions with your values, when we feel stressed because of decisions we have made it is generally because we have acted out of alignment with our values. For example, choosing to skip the gym when we value our training can cause us to stress about a loss of progress.

· Staying on top of your health and fitness also can help with stress relief, as when life feels hectic around you being in control of your health can help you feel in control of your life. So do what you can to not throw in the towel and keep up with your current training and nutrition as much as possible!

Aside from the above points, the other main contributor to stress is usually feeling overwhelmed with your workload or a lack of time to get the things you need to do done. This is where proper Time Management becomes important, we touched on this when we talked about sleep, but it’s just as important for stress. If you are constantly feeling like you are behind on work or study, struggling to fit training into your schedule and don’t have time to eat healthy food, then you probably need to dial in your week and find out where all your time is going! Now this isn’t to say that you aren’t busy, but I like the quote “there is always someone who has it harder than you, doing more than you”. It may sound harsh, but it means that no matter how busy you feel you are, there are probably ways you can improve and find more time in your week! Here are a few tips I have found helpful to find more time in my week and reduce my stress levels.

· Utilise your calendar: If you always feel like you have heaps to do and no time to do it, try planning out your whole week with your calendar. Throw in work, social events, study time, meetings, anything that you need to block out time for. Once this is done you can add in slots for training, so everything doesn’t feel like chaos. Having your week planned out will allow you to see how much time you actually have!

· Become a morning person: We all stay up late doing nothing of importance, only to wake up tired, skip breakfast, rush to work and get home exhausted. No wonder training is the last thing you want to do when you get home. Going to bed at a reasonable time and getting up earlier will not only mean you have more hours asleep, but it also means you can train before work, not be in a rush first thing and set the tone for a productive day.

· Meal Prep for the week ahead or use a meal prep company: Meal prep is pretty self-explanatory, if you find yourself not having time to cook each day block out some time on a Sunday afternoon to prep a few meals in advance! This, or buying some pre made meals from either a meal prep company or the shops can save plenty of time throughout the week.

· Take your training gear to work so you can train straight afterwards: If you do train after work, it can help to take a change of clothes and any training gear to work with you and head straight to the gym when you finish. Depending how close you live to the gym this could save a heap of time as you won’t have to go home before heading back out to the gym, plus it removes the temptation of staying on the couch once you get home.

Weekends

Weekends can be make or break for your results. On the one hand, we generally have more free time that we can choose to spend however we want, however, with this comes a lack of structure that can throw people off. The temptation of social events usually comes with the weekend and I’m sure you have heard the term “calories don’t count on the weekend” thrown around. But I assure you they definitely do!

Sure, you might think of the weekend as just two days of a whole week, but if you include Friday (Friday nights begin most peoples “wild weekends”) it becomes 43% of your week, suddenly it sounds like much more. This is where your environment can become a big factor in your success, if you are surrounded by people who don’t really care about their fitness then it can be tempting to go with the crowd and throw your hard work down the drain. But I see plenty of people killing themselves throughout the week working towards their goals only to reset once the weekend hits. You don’t want to be one of those people!

Now I’m not saying you need to have no social life and be a recluse on the weekend, but they can be a great opportunity to get ahead. You have more time to fit a training session in and you aren’t in a rush at work, so you have time to make real food or meal prep for the week ahead. They can be a huge opportunity or a huge roadblock, the choice is yours…

Oh, and what’s one of the main contributors to whether or not your weekends are productive…

Alcohol

Now when it comes to alcohol there are a couple of ways we can go, for most people, having a couple of drinks won’t mean your gains go in the bin. Plenty of athletes and high-level lifters drink recreationally and still make wicked progress. However, a lot of people don’t just have a couple, and this is where the problems arise. While it’s difficult to give specific recommendations on how much alcohol you can consume before you start to feel the negative effects, (because alcohol can affect us all differently), we can agree that drinking so much that you experience a hangover probably means you have had “too much”.

Dosage Makes the Poison, if you consider a low dosage of alcohol to cause you to feel “a bit tipsy”, a medium dosage to make you “feel drunk” and a high dosage to make you “feel completely wasted”, a low dosage likely won’t have much of an effect on your recovery. However, anything more than that is where we usually start to see some side effects. Listed below are some of the consequences of too higher alcohol intake:

· Inhibited Muscle Recovery: This means that sessions performed before drinking will not only be less effective, but your muscles will also take longer to recover, and you will be more sore than normal for longer than normal.

· Negative effects on following sessions: Have you ever trained with a hangover? Even if you have a rest day planned following a heavy night of drinking, it is likely that the next session you perform will be sub-standard.

· Habits around a big night: It’s not just the alcohol itself which can hurt your progress but the things you do on a typical “big night out”. Poor food decisions, dehydration, and any other “substances” you may ingest will also have their own effects. This also includes the following day if you are hungover, which typically comes with its own poor choices surrounding food and a lack of movement.

Minimising the damage: The standard tricks that can help with hangovers also apply here, mainly staying as hydrated as possible around your alcohol consumption. However, this is certainly a case of prevention being much better than the cure! It also helps to schedule a rest day the day after a big night. But mainly, just don’t go overboard with your consumption and you’ll be fine, low doses don’t have much of an effect on progress, and the occasional binge (and by occasional I mean months apart, not weeks) won’t have any long term effects besides just slowing things down a little in the immediate aftermath.

Final Thoughts: We often jump to change our training program when we aren’t getting the results we want. But you would be surprised how often we are simply under-recovered and therefore unable to train with enough intensity, consistently enough to elicit progress. So next time you feel like your training is going poorly or are struggling to stay consistent with your nutrition, do a stocktake of your recovery and see where abouts you are falling short! If you want to hear more about recovery, we have a podcast episode of Weekly Burn which was based on the notes I used to make this article! Give it a listen here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6u3XchGBRSo4M2cOqABgTe?si=ejv8JKAVTlaODevxcTNSxw