Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Sometimes we overdo it when it comes to exercise, and pay the price afterwards. There are things we can do to speed up our recovery time, though, including:

  • Not relying on post-workout stretching

  • Alternating hot and cold therapy, or if that’s not practical, just cold

    • We’re sorry; we know a hot bath is more pleasant, but here be science

  • Eating protein (whenever) and carbs after a workout

  • Avoiding alcohol, which is not the carb you want

  • Hydrating, of course

  • Supplementing with creatine

  • Supplementing with tart cherry powder

  • Getting good rest, including good sleep

• Being unable to easily participate in spoken conversations is not just an inconvenience; it’s also a [causal, fixable] risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.

  • Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

The Most Anti-Aging Exercise

Zuzka talks deep squats, and why (and how!) we should take care to develop and maintain our ability to do this as we get older. Including ways to make it easier if you can’t at first, without taking away the benefits! If you have bad knees or stiff hips especially, this video is for you:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

💪 MAIN FEATURE

How To Speed Up Recovery After A Workout (According To Actual Science)

Has your enthusiasm ever been greater than your ability, when it comes to exercise?

Perhaps you leapt excitedly into a new kind of exercise, or maybe you made a reprise of something you used to do, and found out the hard way you’re not in the same condition you used to be?

If you’ve ever done an exercise session and then spent the next three days recovering, this one’s for you. And if you’ve never done that? Well, prevention is better than cure!

Post-exercise stretching probably won’t do much to help

If you like to stretch after a workout, great, don’t let us stop you. Stretching is, generally speaking, good.

But: don’t rely on it to hasten recovery. Here’s what scientists Afonso et al. had to say recently, after doing a big review of a lot of available data:

Source: The Effectiveness of Post-exercise Stretching in Short-Term and Delayed Recovery of Strength, Range of Motion and Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

…and breath! What a title.

Hot and Cold

Contrast bath therapy (alternating hot and cold, which notwithstanding the name, can also be done in a shower) can help reduce muscle soreness after workout, because of how the change in temperature stimulates vasodilation and vasoconstriction, reducing inflammation while speeding up healing:

Contrast Water Therapy and Exercise Induced Muscle Damage: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

If doing this in the shower isn’t practical for you, and you (like most people) have only one bathtub, then cold is the way to go for the most evidence-based benefits:

Whole-Body Cryotherapy in Athletes: From Therapy to Stimulation. An Updated Review of the Literature

Eat protein whenever, carbs after

Eating protein before a workout can boost muscle protein synthesis. Be aware that even if you’re not bodybuilding, your body will still need to do cell replacement and repair, including in any muscle tissue that got damaged* during the workout

If you don’t like eating before a workout, eating protein after is fine too:

Pre- versus post-exercise protein intake has similar effects on muscular adaptations

Eating carbs after a workout helps replace lost muscle glycogen.

For a lot more details on optimal nutrition timing in the context of exercise (carbs, proteins, micronutrients, different kinds of exercise, etc), check out this very clear guide:

International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutrient timing

Alcohol is not the post-workout carb you want

Shocking, right? But of course, it’s very common for casual sportspeople to hit the bar for a social drink after their activity of choice.

However, consuming alcohol after exercise doesn’t merely fail to help, it actively inhibits glycogen replacement and protein synthesis:

Alcohol Ingestion Impairs Maximal Post-Exercise Rates of Myofibrillar Protein Synthesis following a Single Bout of Concurrent Training

Also, if you’re tempted to take alcohol “to relax”, please be aware that alcohol only feels relaxing because of what it does to the brain; to the rest of the body, it is anything but, and also raises blood pressure and cortisol levels.

As to what to drink instead…

Hydrate, and consider creatine and tart cherry supplementation

Hydration is a no-brainer, but when you’re dehydrated, it’s easy to forget!

Creatine is a very well-studied supplement, that helps recovery from intense exercise:

International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine

Tart cherry juice has been found to reduce muscle damage, soreness, and inflammation after exercise:

Powdered tart cherry supplementation demonstrates benefit on markers of catabolism and muscle soreness following an acute bout of intense lower body resistance exercise

Wondering where you can get tart cherry powder? We don’t sell it (or anything else), but here’s an example product on Amazon.

And of course, actually rest

That includes good sleep, please. Otherwise…

Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Acute Skeletal Muscle Recovery after Exercise

Rest well!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Hearing So Clear It Has No Peers

Have you heard the good news?

A team of top German engineers has just unveiled the world’s very first hearing aids with dual processing, and the results are clear... Literally!

Why is this so special? Thanks to this cutting-edge German technology, these tiny devices capture speech and noise separately, resulting in groundbreaking levels of noise reduction and speech clarity.

Hear.com is so confident you’ll love their product, all devices come with a 45-day no-risk trial. They’ve already got 385,000 happy customers and counting, and their award-winning customer service will help with anything you need.

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Q&A: The signs of dementia and what can be done to stave it off

• Rising COVID hospitalizations, new variants have Americans on edge

• Finding a live brain worm is rare: four ways to protect yourself from more common parasites

• Presenting different symptoms, women suffer worse heart disease outcomes than men

• Dementia risk grows with increased exposure to air pollution, study finds

• Magnitude of placebo response identified in drug for treatment of hot flashes

• Small changes make a big difference: Mediterranean lifestyle linked to lower mortality

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression - by Dr. Edward Bullmore

Firstly, let's note that this book was published in 2018, so the "radical new" approach is more like “tried and tested and validated” now.

Of course, inflammation in the brain is also linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative disorders, but that's not the main topic here.

Dr. Bullmore, a medical doctor, psychiatrist, and neuroscientist with half the alphabet after his name, knows his stuff. We don't usually include author bio information here, but it's also relevant that he has published more than 500 scientific papers and is one of the most highly cited scientists worldwide in neuroscience and psychiatry.

What he explores in this book, with a lot of hard science made clear for the lay reader, is the mechanisms of action of depression treatments that aren't just SSRIs, and why anti-inflammatory approaches can work for people with "treatment-resistant depression".

The book was also quite prescient in its various declarations of things he expects to happen in the field in the next five years, because they've happened now, five years later.

Bottom line: if you'd like to understand how the mind and body affect each other in the cases of inflammation and depression, with a view to lessening either or both of those things, this is a book for you.

Click here to check out The Inflamed Mind, and take good care of yours!

Wishing you a wonderfully restorative weekend,

The 10almonds Team