How much should you stretch | How to prevent injury in the gym | How to use massage gun

YouTube, what's going on? Welcome back to the channel. Welcome to the video. Hope you enjoyed the little, like, whatever that was, seductive intro of me doing random stretches and foam rolling and stuff. But in this video, you and I are going to be talking about stretching, foam rolling, that massage gun thing, and just all things how to recover from your workout and how to prevent injury in your workouts. We're going to first start with the 3 main ones you saw, you know, the typical stretching, foam rolling, using a massage gun. We're going to talk about what they do. This probably should say they— what they do, how often and when you should be performing these modalities, stretching, foam rolling, that kind of stuff. And then we're going to talk about the short-term versus the long-term benefits of each of these modalities of recovery. Then at the end, we're also going to talk about the 4 most important things that you should be doing in order to make sure you are recovering properly from your workouts, preventing injury, and all of that good jazz. All right, so first and foremost, let's get this straight. What does foam rolling, stretching, all of that good stuff actually do? And I say actually because most people think like if you were to like, you know, sit there and do your static stretching, that that's going to somehow magically like break up your muscle tissue, or if you sit on this foam roller, magically your glute muscles are going to get way less tight and they're going to break up your glute muscles. Let me assure you of something. You are not actually breaking up your muscle tissue or breaking up your muscle fascia by rolling around on a foam roller or stretching. Think about it for a half second. If all your— if your muscles were that malleable— that's a good word— if your muscles were that malleable and all you had to do was sit on something hard? That's what she said. So if all you had to do was sit on something hard and like your muscles would just start to like get broken up, that would be very, very bad for our body. Like what if you sat down on a hard bench one time? Or what if you sat down and sat down on something at a weird angle? Your muscles would just like start breaking up. No, that'd be very, very bad. So it's not that when you're doing foam rolling or massage gun or stretching or whatever it is, You're not necessarily breaking up your muscle tissue. Here's what you are doing. It's going to be a couple of things. First and foremost, if you sit on this foam roller and spend some time on it, you are kind of activating something called your parasympathetic nervous system. You don't even really need to know what that means, but just know that there's 2 main forms of your, of your nervous system. There's the parasympathetic, which is kind of like your rest and digest, right? That's how your body recovers. That's how your body, you know, recovers from workouts and you're like calm. The sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight. That's where like you're going and you're, you're stressed out. Your body's at a high stress because it's got to keep you alive, right? So when you do these modalities of recovery, you are turning on your parasympathetic nervous system a tad bit more. The same thing with like when you get massages, right? When people give you massages again, It's not necessarily that like you're breaking up a ton of muscle tissue. It's just you're getting yourself into this parasympathetic nervous system state, which can then allow for things like, example, more blood flow to your muscles. If you're able to get more blood flow to your muscles, you're then able to, you know, get out inflammation, get out old nutrients, get in new nutrients, get in new blood, which is then going, going to allow your muscles to recover better. Your muscles like quote unquote feel less tight just because, you know, again, they don't have as much inflammation. They hurt less, they're less sore. You know, there's a, uh, you're recovering from the muscle damage you put on them through your workouts. And so that's kind of what getting yourself into the parasympathetic nervous system state can do. And that's one of the reasons why stretching, foam rolling, all those kinds of things may be beneficial. The second thing is going to be, it can increase some short-term— we're going to touch on this, but it can potentially increase some short-term range of motion. So like for example, if you spend 2 minutes foam rolling, foam rolling your quads and your hamstrings and your glutes before leg day, you might be able to get a little bit more range of motion in those particular muscles because again, there's more blood flow and things of that nature, which could either potentially help your workout or it could potentially harm your workout. But we'll get into that a bit later when we talk about the long-term versus short-term effects. But it can improve some short-term range of motion. Now before we talk about the short-term versus long-term, now that we've covered what they do, like I said, they're not like these magical tools that are like all of a sudden going to fix your muscles and they're breaking up the muscle tissue and this, that, and the other. They can help you recover, but I really wouldn't spend that much time foam rolling, stretching, massage gun. Let me kind of break down what I would personally do with all 3 of those. All right, so when we're first going to talk about like foam rolling, the massage gun, even massages to a degree, I would usually spend about roughly 5 to 10 minutes max On those kinds of things, either before your workout, after your workout, or before you go to bed. And the reason I say one of those 3 is because again, when you do it before your workout, you may be able to get some potential range of motion increase. And so, you know, if you're foam rolling your glutes and you want some, you know, potential range of motion increase, you might be able to have that happen for you. If you do it after your workout, remember you are able to turn on your parasympathetic nervous system state. A bit more, which when you get done your workout, you want to transition from the sympathetic nervous system, which is again the fight or flight, which is what you have when you're doing workouts. You want to transition from the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic nervous system as quickly as you can. Doing some foam rolling, doing some stretching, doing some massage gun might help you get into that a bit quicker, which is again going to allow you to have, you know, better blood flow, better recovery, you know, the process of getting out the inflammation, all of that good stuff. So you might be able to input it after your workout or before you go to bed for basically all of those same reasons as well. The main one, again, if you're trying to go to bed, go to sleep, you're trying to get into that parasympathetic nervous system state because that is the rest and digest. And so if you spend 5 or 10 minutes doing some foam rolling, massage gunning, whatever it is before you go to bed, Can help get you into that nervous system state. Again though, 5 or 10 minutes a day. Like, and, and I would honestly too, I would probably pick one of those. You don't need to do them like all 3. You don't need to do before your workout, after your workout, before you go to bed. Like, I would probably just pick one and like spend 5 to 10 minutes on it. Because can it be beneficial? Sure, it can be beneficial. Is it going to make that big of a difference? I don't necessarily know that it'll make that big of a difference, so I wouldn't spend that much time time on it, if that makes sense. And now for stretching, like, you know, doing this, the, the normal static stretches like you saw me doing earlier where I was kind of like on the ground, like stretching my hamstrings, stretching my adductor, your inner thigh, I would usually save that for either after your workout or before you go to bed. Because if you do those static stretches before your workout It could potentially actually either— and I don't want to scare you when I say this because it's not like, it's not like what I'm about to say is going to be like a make or break, but it can potentially decrease your workout performance and even potentially increase your risk of injury if you're doing a lot of static stretching before your workouts. So you don't really want to do a ton of them before your workout. I would leave it for either after your workout or like I said, before you go to bed for all of the same reasons that we talked about earlier. And again, you know, doing 5 to 10 minutes, you don't need to spend 30, 40, 50 minutes stretching, foam rolling, all that kind of stuff. A good solid routine of about 5 to 10 minutes can really help. So that is when to do it and how often to do it. Now let's talk about the last thing, which is going to be the short term versus long term. It'll actually play right into the last part of the video. Okay, you recalled earlier that I said, you know, stretching, foam rolling, all that good stuff might potentially increase your range of motion and might potentially increase things in the short term. This is really important for you to understand. Most people get high off of the feeling of foam rolling because like if you foam roll or if you do a stretch or if you do a massage gun, you're like in the moment, you're like, oh my God, this is like I can really feel my glutes like, oh God, this hurts. You're like making those ugly faces. And then you know when you're stretching, you're like, man, you know I can really feel this stretching. And you might get up and you might feel better. You're like, oh man, like I can feel like I have more range of motion. I can feel like it's not as tight. I can feel this, that, and the other. But why do you have to keep doing these things over and over and over? Why do your muscles keep getting tight? Why do you have to keep spending ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty minutes foam rolling to feel better? All of this is because. It creates a very short-term response. You are not creating any long-term adaptations. You're not creating any long-term responses. You're just doing the foam rolling or doing the stretching and feeling better in the moment and a little bit after, but you keep going back to getting injured or you keep going back to like feeling tight in your hips or your quads or your chest or your shoulders or whatever it is. You're not creating any long-term adaptations, which is why I also say you shouldn't be spending a ton of time on this kind of stuff. Can it help? For sure. But you want to spend most of your time on the long-term adaptations, the long-term results that you're trying to see. So you can not only help the issue in the moment in time, but you can keep those adaptations. It's almost like when you get stronger, which we'll talk about in a second, But when you get stronger, it's like, cool, you could lift 10 pounds and then you can lift 15 pounds and then you can lift 20 pounds, you can lift 25 pounds. If you keep working out, you'll always be able to lift 10 pounds and 15 pounds and 20 pounds because you got stronger. You made long-term adaptations. That's what you should be aiming for when you're talking about how to recover from your workouts and how to prevent injury, which again, this leads right into the 4 most important things you should probably focus on. If that's a concern of yours. The first thing you want to do, shocking, you want to get stronger. Think about when you're doing a Romanian deadlift, right? When you're doing a Romanian deadlift, I want you to think about what you're doing with your quad, with your hamstring muscles and your glute muscles, right? At the bottom, as you go down into a Romanian deadlift, you are getting a full stretch on your glute and hamstring muscles, right? As you stand back up from the RDL, You are shortening the glute hamstring muscles. You're taking your muscles through this full range of motion right here. Or even think about a hip thrust, for example. Once again, at the bottom of a hip thrust you're stretching your glute muscles. At the top of a hip thrust you are strengthening— I'm sorry, you are getting into the shortened position. You are squeezing your glute muscles. I'm trying to combine all these words. Um, you're squeezing your glute muscles in a shortened position. Basically you're taking your muscle through a full range of motion and getting stronger. If you want the best way to get the best adaptations and the best long-term adaptations in mobility, in range of motion, and not having tight muscles, the best way you do that is by getting stronger with a proper workout program. Taking your muscles through a proper full range of motion, having good form, having control over the weight. This is the best way to recover from your workouts and stay injury-free. The really big part there is stay injury-free because if you're doing a squat, doing a deadlift, doing a shoulder press, doing a row, and you're taking your muscles through a full range of motion and you're strengthening your muscles through that full range of motion, how, like, That is the best way to bulletproof your body. That is the best way to prevent injury in your body. And so just be sure the number one thing you want to focus on is getting on a proper strength training program. If you want some help with getting on a proper strength training program, I will link my Clubhouse here below. It has all of my workouts every single month. You have a new workout program, exact reps, exact exercises, exact sets, exact instructional videos to show you exactly how to perform the movements properly. So You can check that out if you want to, but just be sure to get on a proper program and strengthen your body because that's the best way to bulletproof your body. That is what you want to spend the most time on. This foam rolling stuff is the very, very small majority. You want to spend the most time on the stuff that's going to get you the long-term progress. The second thing is going to be getting enough protein in per day. I'm not going to go super in-depth on this one because I've already done a lot of videos here on YouTube about how to eat more protein, how to find your protein goals, so on and so forth. But remember, protein is the only macronutrient that helps build and retain lean muscle mass. And so if you want to make sure, you know, you're preventing injury, you're getting strong muscles, you're properly recovering, recovering from your workouts, you want to make sure you're eating enough protein in order to facilitate that recovery, which again is going to help recovery but also prevent injury as well. The third thing, which again is like not sexy at all whatsoever, but it should— and everybody just blows it off and they just like goes right by their head, but it's sleep. Remember what did I say earlier? There's 2 types of nervous systems, right? Your sympathetic and your parasympathetic. Really, your parasympathetic nervous system can't really turn on to the most degree until you go to sleep, because when you're asleep, your body's not trying to like be alert and keep you alive. When you're awake and going throughout your day and Dealing with all kinds of stress. And, you know, remember, your body doesn't know whether you're like dealing with stress from work or your spouse, or you're dealing with stress from like you're putting yourself through a workout. It just knows, I got to be on my shit, I got to stay alive, and I got to make sure I can handle this stress. And so your sympathetic nervous system stays on. That nervous system though isn't the nervous system that helps promote rest and digest and blood flow and recovery and so on and so forth. So Just making sure you get adequate sleep. Please try to get at least 7 hours per night. I know it's hard. I know it's difficult. Parents with young kids, I understand kids are waking you up. I, I don't understand because I don't have young kids, but I understand because I've coached enough people to know. I get it. It's hard. Just really, really, really try to prioritize your sleep as much as humanly possible. That is like, again, one of the number one ways to recover from your workouts and also prevent injury. Because if you're not sleeping, you're not recovering. If you're not recovering, You're not getting out old blood, you're not getting in new blood to your muscles. If you're not recovering from your workouts, you're going to go into your other workouts that are like up and coming under-recovered, which can lead to more injury from bad form or just like improper recovery. So sleep, I know it's not sexy, but it's very, very, very important. And the last one is going to be, please take real rest days. I can't express enough How important it is to take real rest days. What do I mean by real rest days? Listen, you can still be active on the days that you're not like doing your strength training workouts. For example, you could swim, you could bike, you could run, you could play basketball. Whatever the case may be, you can do the bike, the treadmill, the elliptical, the stair stepper, rower. I don't care. When I say real rest day, I mean you should not be pushing yourself balls to the walls, super high intensity on. Your rest days. Like, you going to a HIIT boot camp class, spending 60 minutes with your heart rate at max capacity, that's not a rest day. You doing a spin class on your rest day where your max heart rate is through the roof, that's not a rest day either. You want to actually give your body the ability to rest and recover. If you don't ever do that because all you're doing is pushing yourself, pushing yourself, pushing yourself, It's the same concept if you were driving your car and you just put your foot down on the gas pedal all day, 24/7, and never took it off. What's going to happen eventually? Your RPMs are going to rev so high, your fucking engine is going to explode. Your body is the same way. You are trying to just put your foot down on the gas pedal. You're not understanding the importance of recovering from your workouts. And remember, there's 3 main stages in your workouts and how you adapt and change your body and get stronger, build muscle, all these things. You put a stress on your body, not trying to flick you off, but you're putting a stress on your body, workouts. Your body recovers from that stress and then it adapts. If you skip the second part, which is the recovery part, you don't get to the third part, which is the adaptation part, which is where you actually create change. And so for all of you out there who think like, oh my God, no rest days, I got to push more, I got to do more, I got to push harder. It's not usually, it's not about pushing harder. It's about push harder when you actually do your strength training workouts three or four times a week, whatever it is, and then on your rest days, move, be active, do your thing, but rest. You don't need to run yourself into the fucking ground. In fact, you're not going to see the progress you want to see if you run yourself into the ground because you're not going to recover. So please take proper rest days. I would strongly encourage you to have at least one proper rest day, if not anywhere between two to four, depending on how you set your workout schedule. Schedule up. And guys, that is the video for today. Hope you enjoyed. If you did, don't fuck with me, subscribe to— there's a lot of people who watch this and don't subscribe. What are you doing? Subscribe to the channel. Well, I want you to subscribe, and if you like it, give it a thumbs up and let me know below if this video helped you. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll chat soon. Bye.