Hey, what's up, motivators Taren here.
If you just started running or exercising,
you find that your muscles are getting sore after running.
That's not very good,
because that is going to lead you to be less likely to actually go and then follow
that up the next day or the day after with another session.
And it's those string together of sessions that creates actual fitness,
that creates actual progress, becomes demotivating when you're always sore.
And it's also not good for your overall health because you're more likely to get
injured when you're running or cycling on tired and sore legs because you aren't
using the muscles properly, you're not functioning properly.
So in this video, we are going to talk about some
scientifically proven ways to deal with sore muscles and then some
scientifically disproven ways to save you time and money.
Make sure that you are training as frequently and as healthily as possible.
My name is Terry Gazelle.
In my twentys, I was overweight unfulfilled.
And couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports, lost £65,
won age groups, race world Championships, broke records and trained and learned
from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You too, can use endurance sports
to change your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system, a system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Motive offers that system,
and I want to share some of the tips from it today.
Let's first start off by defining what recovery is.
I look at recovery in two different pillars.
First, there's your chronic recovery, and then there's your acute recovery.
Chronic recovery is things like,
is your total training balance offset by an appropriate amount of rest
and recovery to make sure that you aren't overtraining and you're also not under
training so that you are getting all the way to your goal,
being as fast as possible, while also not dipping into any of those
overtraining or unhealthy or injury ridden kind of training methods.
That when all you focus on is training load.
Without your training recovery, it's more likely to result in that.
Now the acute recovery is,
are you recovering every single day to prepare yourself for the next day?
And this is actually measurable.
This is known as things like DOMS delayed onset muscle soreness.
When your muscles just feel really beat up, your muscle tissues feel like they've
done a lot of work and they're really sore.
It can actually be physically measured
by interleukin six, Creactive protein and Creatine kinase.
So they have started doing studies because they know, all right, well,
these athletes, they feel domes, they feel a little bit sore.
Maybe there's a sense of perceived
fatigue, but can we actually measure it and start creating studies?
There have been two good studies that I really like looking at.
I'll link to these in the description below.
But you'll just see them here.
This study here looked at generally what
causes muscle damage, soreness, fatigue, inflammation.
All of those factors that we looked at that are measurable.
And then it started narrowing it down to triathletes and endurance athletes,
like physically, what is going to prevent endurance athletes from having that acute
muscle soreness that is going to prevent them from backing up a good day
of training with another good day of training?
These two studies and then a whole bunch of others that I looked at to confirm or
deny what was found in these studies that I find just really nicely summarized
the general consensus of what the current science says.
So based on these and other studies, I want to go through three buckets
of things that definitely help you recover quicker, things that might help you
recover quicker that you should try on your own and then things that you
should really just forget about Because the science just doesn't support it.
And then maybe something to just try
because the science is very much in the early stages.
So when it comes to clear beneficial ways to reduce your muscle soreness after
a workout, massage seems to be the hands down winner.
Study after study after study show that massage is the winner.
That reduces delayed onset muscle soreness.
And the measured reason for this is thought that it actually reduces
the cortisol, the stress response, and then increases beta endorphins.
So just feel good chemicals.
It might be from just the fact of reducing stress and then improving feel good
chemicals that the domes goes away, but in any case, the DOMS certainly goes away.
And the indications of heavy, heavy training volume tend to get dissipated.
The other thing that clearly helps is sleep.
Yeah, it's no secret that sleep is going to help you avoid the overtraining issues
that we talked about in the first bucket with chronic training issues.
But it also helps in day to day acute training issues.
Sleep is like the number one performance enhancer that you can use.
So this is no surprise.
And then when we get into somewhat helps.
But it's not even like a, one a is massage and one B are these options?
This is like a long way back when I looked at the charts and graphs of all
the studies that were looking at massage versus other methods.
These other methods were way behind.
And the thing about it that's really
interesting is that these methods are the ones that are talked about as
the primary recovery methods, but they just don't hold a candle to sleep.
And then some massage, which we'll talk about why it might
actually be more affordable than you think in a bit.
So things like compression,
water immersion, cold water exposure, foam rolling, these tend to be very mixed.
Some studies show that they do help.
Other studies show that they don't help.
Other studies show that if they do help.
It's largely just the placebo effect or
in the case of recovery boots, I've heard of studies that are showing
that recovery boots actually don't really help at all.
But it's the act of lying down for that half hour that you're
in the recovery boots that is actually going to help.
So they're still helping because it's forcing you to actually rest.
But it's not necessarily the recovery boots themselves.
The nice thing about this is that these
tend to be the most expensive ways to recover.
And if you're looking specifically at reducing delayed onset muscle soreness,
you can save yourself a little bit of money and not actually use them.
And then in the definitely doesn't help bucket, we're talking about things like
electrostimulation, Saunas, cryotherapy, stretching after a workout.
These things are just shown to not help.
So then you might ask, well,
why am I doing cold therapy and swimming a few times a week in the ocean?
Or why am I doing the Sauna?
It's because I'm not doing it for delayed onset muscle soreness and improvement
of that, I am doing the Sauna for overall longevity and health.
I am doing the cold exposure for overall longevity and health while recognizing
that the Sauna itself is actually a stressor.
And I need more sleep as a result of it.
And cold exposure is the same.
It's a stressor,
and it is good at teaching the body how to deal with stress, but it is a stress.
These things aren't in place of proper rest and proper sleep.
These things fall, in my case, into an entirely different bucket.
More in the case of longevity, the final bucket that's worth mentioning
is the try it for yourself and see if it helps.
Omega threes and branch chain amino acids have been shown in some people,
depending on their absorbability and their genetics and what they have going
on elsewhere in their diet, that these two things Omega threes
and branch chain amino acids might actually reduce domes as well.
But that's very much a try it for yourself.
So then this gets back to what happens if you are chronically sore week after week
after week when you are running or doing endurance sports.
Well, I think there's a three step process that you can follow.
Number one, make sure that your chronic recovery, your overall level of rest,
your overall level of sleep, your overall stress levels are balanced
in proportion to the training that you've got.
If you find that you're sore day after day after day, chronically sore,
your mood is a little bit low, your motivation is a little bit low.
That's a good indication that you're
training too much and you need to bring it down to be in balance.
And you'll probably actually perform
better because your body is actually able to absorb the training.
Second, if you're finding that you are sore occasionally here and there after
the odd workout, well, what you can do is do some self massage.
This is where I say things like foam
rolling aren't all bad, but things like Trigger point therapy,
the stick that you can roll on yourself, anything where you can move the muscles
a little bit, make the muscle tissue a little bit more relaxed,
let go of that tension and just do a little bit of self care.
This is similar to massage where you don't have to go and spend 90 or $100 every
single week to take care of this or every single time you are sore.
You can take care of this for about five
to ten minutes while you're watching TV every single night.
And this has been shown to reduce the dawns.
Now is it as good as a 1 hour massage?
Not necessarily, because it doesn't have
that same calming low cortisol effect, but having a nice ten to 15 minutes
experience that is intentionally calm and meant to reduce your stress.
This is likely going to help, and the third thing to do is make sure
that you are building up at an appropriate rate anytime you're doing anything new.
This is even for seasoned endurance athletes.
If you are going from a lot of treadmill running to a lot of flat land running or
a lot of flat land running to all of a sudden including Hills.
Anytime you add something new, expect your muscles to be sore and expect
that this is a normal course of adapting to the process.
When I moved from flat as a pancake Winnipeg where you can watch your dog run
away for three days to hilly Vancouver Island, I became sore in a lot
of different places and I had to ease into being able to run on trails.
Seven months later,
I'm still realizing that my muscles are slowly adapting to this hilly terrain.
So in your case, anything new that you're
doing has to be just gradually implemented into the training plan.
In bouts of about 8% incremental increases per week.
And when in doubt, go easy on yourself.
We only get one life.
We only get one body.
So we've got to take care of it and we've got to make sure that we feel good.
It doesn't do us any favors to get to a finish line.
Having been sore for the previous six
months and hated our lives, we want to enjoy the entire process.
We want every day to be a reward,
not every day to be punishment so that we can actually go and enjoy race day.
We want to enjoy the preparation and race day.
Thank you for watching Motivators.
If you're looking for a training plan
that incorporates these methods that is as good as a one on one coach,
but as inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our Motive training app
that covers triathlons, running races, dothlons, swim runs and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free also if you'd rather listen
to these tips we also publish these videos in podcast format on the Terrain's motive
method podcast so you can check that out and if you don't want to do either
of those things but you found this video helpful hit us up with a virtual high five
by smashing the like button below later motivators.