How To Recover From A Hard Workout I Muscle Soreness From Working Out

YouTube, what is going on? Welcome to the video. Welcome back to the channel. In this video, we're gonna be covering everything you need to know about recovering from your workouts. Most people undervalue recovery in this equation to change their body. You have to remember, working out is 50% of the equation. Recovering from the workouts is the other 50% of the equation. If you are not recovering from your workouts, you will not see your body change. It's as simple as that. I had to learn this the hard way early on. I was working out 6, 7 days a week, 2 hours a day, 2 days a week, never seeing any progress, always getting injured, getting very frustrated as to why I was not seeing progress. I was putting in so much work, so much effort, But, I wasn't seeing progress. This is why. Because you have to remember, the way your body changes is through a stress-adaptation-response cycle. There's a stress you put on your body. Your body says, oh, holy shit! This person's— your body doesn't know whether you're lifting 10 pounds or 100 pounds or a barbell or a cable or whatever the case may be. It just knows stress. So, your body says, hmm, this person's putting stress on me. It's trying to kill me. Essentially, essentially that's what's going on. It's the fight or flight response, right? So your body says, all right, cool, we're going to fight back and we're going to adapt to this stress. We're going to get stressed, recover from the stress, and then adapt to that stress basically by growing stronger, more defined muscles, losing body fat, whatever the case may be. That's the cycle. You put a stress, you recover from the stress, and you adapt to that stress. Thus changing your body. There's a critical part there that most people forget about. It is recovering from your workouts. If you don't do that, you are missing that part of the equation and that circle can't go around. So this video is very important and that's why I want to cover it. So I want to break it up into 3 tiers, the most important, the medium important, and the least important. Now you might be surprised at which the order and what is under these specific things here. Bear with me for a second. I'm putting the most important one first because it's the most important. Some people are gonna tell you, ah, leave your best information at the end of the video so they watch the video. I don't care. I need you to understand this, so most important is coming first. The 3 most important things I'm gonna cover piece by piece. Number 1, sleep. Sleep. That is the most important thing when it comes to recovering from your workouts. And I already know some people are gonna watch this and just kind of like, oh, they're gonna get that little thing on the YouTube down here. They're gonna scroll ahead. It's like, fuck this guy talking about sleep. For some reason, us as humans just like to overlook the massive importance of getting proper sleep. And when I say proper sleep, I mean 7 to 9 hours a night. And I don't even mean that. The research shows that because all in the scientific literature Anything under 7 hours is categorized as sleep deprived. So when you are sleep deprived, when you are not getting adequate sleep— sleeping is when your body recovers. It's the rest and digest. There's 2 forms of your nervous system. There's the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system kicks on. That's the rest and digest. The sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight. When you're alive and walking around during your day at work with your spouse, with your kids, whatever, your sympathetic nervous system has to be turned on because your body has to be alert and keep you alive. When you are sleeping, that's when your body can rest and digest and basically rest, digest, and recover. RDR: rest, digest, recover. We'll use that. Your body can RDR: rest, digest, recover. Because during the day, It can't do that. So if you go have a super hard workout and get 4 hours of sleep, you could do everything else on this list that we're going to talk about here today, and you still will not be properly recovered because your body— the only real time your body recovers is when you sleep. And listen, I understand for some people it's harder than others. If you have young kids, if you work shift work, night shift, or the case may be, I get it. I understand. But point being, you need to prioritize your sleep more. And I'm talking to you, person who scrolls through Instagram or scrolls through YouTube or is watching this at 2:00 AM. I get comments all the time on like my TikTok videos like, oh, saw this at 3:00 AM. Like, what the fuck are you doing at 3:00 AM watching TikTok? Like, I just don't fucking understand. So, I'm sure there's ways you can get more or better sleep. You have to start working that into your routine if you're serious about recovering from your workouts. And changing your body. If you're not, by all means, I don't give a shit. Like, it's up to you, it's your life. But the top of the top things when it comes to recovering from your workouts is getting adequate sleep, 7 to 9 hours per night. So that's number 1. Number 2, proper programming. And what I mean by this is proper workout programming, proper workout design. There's so many things I can encompass in this little topic. I say little topic with like air quotations because I could do a whole 5-hour YouTube video on program design, how to structure your workouts, how to design your workouts, all that, right? I'm gonna touch on some of the main points here. If you want to learn more about designing a proper workout program, what it should look like, I have an entire video here on YouTube, so feel free to check that out. Number 1, I wanna talk about the frequency and duration of your workouts. Because again, for example, you can do all the workouts in the world, but if you can't recover from them, then what's the point? Like, for example, I see oftentimes like girls who want to grow their glutes, they're trying to do glutes like 5 times a week. Like Monday's glute day, Tuesday's glute day, Wednesday biceps, Thursday glute day, Friday glute day, Saturday glute day. And I'm like, you— there's just— Good fucking luck recovering from your workouts. There's just no way you're going to recover from your workouts. And so number one, hit your muscle groups 2 times per week. And when I say muscle groups, think upper body, lower body. There's muscles in your upper body. There's muscles in your lower body. Hit those 2 times per week. This could look like lower body, upper body, lower body, upper body, 4 times a week. This could look like lower body, upper body, full body, 3 times per week. But either way, since that full body day hits both muscle groups, You're hitting your muscle groups 2 times a week. Where I see a lot of people go wrong is they try to do like a full body workout 6 days a week in this bootcamp, which I'm going to be very— listen, if you enjoy it and you like it and that's what you want to do, I, who the hell am I to tell you otherwise? Who am I? Who is this guy who has this fucking straggly beard and needs a goddamn haircut? Who am I to tell you any different? Right? Cool. Kudos to you. If you like doing Orangetheory, if you like doing F45, If you like doing your local boot camp, whatever, that's fine. Keep doing it. But, the purpose of this video is to educate you on proper recovery. And so, if you're hitting full body 5 times a week, back to back to back to back to back, there's simply just no way you are going to properly recover from your workouts. It's just, it's kind of impossible. There's not much you can do about it. This is why having a properly designed program is such a massive benefit to you. Um, like for example, your muscle groups typically require 24 to 48 hours in between hitting them. So for example, if you hit glutes on Monday, at the very least, you got to wait until Wednesday to go to, to do glutes. And if not Thursday, because if you're training them properly, they probably will take up to 48 hours to kind of fully recover. So like, again, that's why I say 2 times a week. Monday lower body, Thursday lower body. Um, having things like that, doing these like high-intensity— and that's my second kind of point here— these like high-intensity full-body workouts, you're just not going to recover properly. Same thing as like, let's talk about like, for example, P90X, which, listen, nothing against it if you enjoy doing it, whatever, but there's just no way you're gonna recover from that program because the other part of this proper programming— again, I could go on for hours about proper programming, but proper programming talking about being able to, uh, wave your intensity, so to speak. And when I say intensity, I don't mean like how sweaty you are, how out of breath you are. I mean like how hard are you pushing yourself, how close to failure are you getting, and to an extent, how high is your heart rate getting. Like, all these things encompass, uh, how intense— how intense your workouts are, the level of intensity with your workouts. And something like P90X where like you know, 6 days a week, your heart rate's 95% the entire workout. And you're just like pushing yourself balls to the walls every single workout, never taking a deload week, always pushing, pushing, pushing. You're never going to recover. You're always going to be under-recovered. You're never going to recover from that because the way that program is set up, there's, you're, there's no way you're going to recover from that. So being able to properly load your, properly wave and load your intensities. So like for example, Whenever I give my client a new program, typically what we do, whether it's my one-on-one clients or the clubhouse or whatever, typically what we do is the first week of a new program is a deload week. And essentially what that means is you're not pushing balls to the walls. You're taking a step back on lifting at your maximum load. You're taking a step back from just intensity overall in general. So you're giving yourself that week to allow your body to recover. And then the next 3 to 4 weeks you push hard, push hard for 3 or 4 weeks, really push yourself, really see some gains, really make some progress. Deload for a week, push hard for 3 or 4 weeks, deload for a week. That's how a properly designed program should look like because you're giving yourself time to recover and you're pushing, giving yourself time to recover and pushing. It's like you can't just go 100 miles an hour on the freeway and through a school zone. Like that's not going to work, right? You, there's different times where you push and different times where you kind of pull back a bit. And so, Being able to have this proper programming and getting away from like the high-intensity 24/7 workouts, that's gonna allow you to recover a lot more. So that's number 2 under the proper programming umbrella. 3, it's a foreign concept, but actually having rest days, like actually taking days where you rest. And when I say rest days, I don't mean like going to do spin class. I don't mean going to do your HIIT boot camp. I don't mean, you know, You know, sprinting miles on miles. I mean like actually, you know, giving your body a fucking rest day. People always ask me, what do I do on rest days, Eric? I'm like, fucking rest. What do you mean, what do you do on rest days? You rest. If you wanna go get like a walk and get some steps, awesome. If you wanna go for a bike ride with your kids, awesome. Like, but you don't need to be doing, you know, spin classes on rest days and hours of burpees on rest days and this and that. Because again, the intent, you're just, you're never allowing your body to recover 'cause the intensity is high. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you work out. On Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, you do your, you know, spin class where your heart rate's through the roof 24/7. When do you expect to recover? It's not gonna happen. So, actually giving yourself rest days is a, you know, a foreign concept these days 'cause everybody's so go, go, go and push really hard and no days off. Like, I did the whole no days off thing and it fucking didn't work. It doesn't work for anybody 'cause you get burnt out because you under-recover because You know, again, that cycle of stress, recovery, adaptation, that cycle can't happen. So, on your rest days, actually rest, please. So, those are the main things for proper programming. Again, I could go on for hours about proper programming, but those are the 3 kind of main points that come to mind for me when talking about proper recovery from your workouts. Now, the last one is going to be Protein. Protein is amazing. Protein is the only macronutrient that helps you build and retain lean muscle mass. This means it is the most important macronutrient for recovery from your workouts. Getting around anywhere from 0.8 to 1 times your goal body weight in pounds, getting around that protein number for the day. So let's say, for example, if you weigh— if you want to weigh 150 pounds, that is your goal body weight. Getting around 120 to 150 grams of protein per day is going to be massively beneficial in you recovering from your workouts because, again, protein is the only macronutrient that is going to help you do that. So if you're undereating on protein, good luck recovering from your workouts. If you want some extra help on how to eat more protein, I did an entire video here on YouTube. I'll link it there above. If you want to, go check that out, but you have to start prioritizing protein If you want to properly recover from your workouts. And when I say prioritizing, I mean like it should be at the top of your head. I know it's probably hard for you. I know it's probably difficult for you. Like, that's okay. Like, we can do hard things. Making sure it's at the top of your head, being at the top of your mind when you go to eat something. Like, when you go to eat said food, where is your protein? Like, I did this earlier on to almost like a fault, but it really taught me that No matter what I had, I had to have some sort of protein. I don't care what else I was having. I don't care where else I was. I don't care if I was at a restaurant, at my house, anything. I had to make sure there was some sort of protein at that feeding time, 'cause if not, I had to go find some. So I would encourage the same for you. No matter what you're doing, no matter where you are, have protein every single time you put something into your mouth. That will help you bring the protein awareness top of mind. And again, if you want to, feel free to check out that video above. Awesome. on how to eat more protein. So, that is the top 3 things. One more time, sleep, proper workout programming, and protein. Those are the 3 most important things when it comes to workout recovery. Now, the medium important things, I probably should write these down. I'll start writing them down, how about that? The medium important things is the first one is going to be pre-workout, pre and post-workout meal. Okay. And again, these are medium important, especially— whoa, hey now— especially the post-workout. Well, they're both important. So I'll talk about pre-workout meal first. The pre-workout meal is going to give you extra energy for your workouts, for whatever training you are about to do. And again, I have an entire video here on my YouTube channel about pre-workouts, everything you need to know about pre-workout actually. Feel free to check that out if you want to. But that's gonna give you extra energy for For that workout, which is going to give your body more fuel. So your body's not running off of no fumes basically. Because if your body's running off of no fumes, I mean, good luck trying to not only recover from a workout, but then go do another workout, right? So pre-workout meal, very important. Post-workout meal, important as well. Again, not as important as these 3 things we talked about over here, but nonetheless still very important because That post-workout meal is essentially what kind of kickstarts your recovery for that workout. Now, I wanna make this very clear. People are prob— sometimes people try to scare you into saying you have to have a protein shake within 30 minutes of your workout. If not, it's a failure and the workout didn't count and you ruined all your progress and you're not gonna recover. That's not true. So please don't worry about that like I used to do when I was younger and dumber. I would literally— here's what I'd do. I would be in the gym and I was like, all right, I timed it. I was like, I just got done my workout. I'm gonna go get my protein shaker. I'm gonna go to the coffee stand because at the time they had sugar at the coffee stand. I would put like 6 packs of sugar in my water. I'm sorry, in my protein shake. I would go back to the bathroom, turn on the hot water, boiling hot water by the way, because like, I don't know, I saw somebody said like hot water like digests faster because I wanted to make it faster because I was like, I can't lose my gains. So boiling hot water, sugar, protein shake, and there was a carbohydrate powder. It was like more sugar essentially. Carbohydrate and creatine powder. And I just chugged this down. I was like, I gotta finish it. I gotta finish it before I lose all my gains. And it was just absurd. And like knowing what I know now, I would've been like, what the fuck are you doing, kid? Like, please stop doing that. But you live and you learn. We all do stupid shit. But that's why I'm trying to help you right now. You don't have to necessarily worry about like getting a meal in in a certain amount of time like post-workout. It's not that big of a deal, but it can be beneficial and it can help kickstart your recovery process. Normally what I tell people is try to have 20 to 30 grams of protein— that almost fell— and try to have 20 to 30 grams of carbohydrates within, you know, 30 to 120 minutes of your workout ending. Again, not the biggest deal, but it's even more so because, yes, it is gonna kickstart your recovery. It's going to spike your insulin. It's going to help push nutrients to your muscles, and it's going to help push new blood flow. It's going to help push water. It's going to help push nutrients. It's going to kick out the lactic acid. Like, it's going to help you recover. But also, if you think about, you know, working out and not going, you know, and going 6 hours without eating, like, that's a lot of stress in your body. So you want to be able to give your body fuel. Everyone's like so afraid to fucking eat food. these days, especially if you want to lose weight. But like, food is fuel. It's much more than fuel, but it is fuel. So like, it's going to help fuel that recovery from your workouts. And so that is, um, the first one, pre and post-workout meal. Now, number 2 in the medium important is going to be hydration. And honestly, hydration is pretty important, but again, it's not as important as the most important things over there. Hydration. Yes. Drinking water. I mean drinking water. Drink water. It's good for you. Everyone asks me, how much water should I drink, Eric? Listen, like, you know, don't overcomplicate it. Drink when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty, drink if your pee is dark yellow. If you want a number on it, I always tell people 5 glasses a day or 2 liters of water per day. But again, those numbers are honestly just like numbers to please you so you can like have this number in your head to shoot for and have a goal to shoot for. Just, just drink your goddamn water. Um, yeah, I mean water, but I also mean sodium, potassium, and magnesium, because those 3 nutrients are also going to help you Recover from your workouts. Again, this is why if you're working out, disclaimer, check with your doctor first, but if you're working out, sodium is not bad for you. And actually, I talk about this in my pre-workout video I've done here on YouTube. I talk about sodium because sodium is massively beneficial for you if you're working out, especially pre-workout, but throughout the entire day it's massively beneficial for you. So sodium, a big thing. You know, don't overdo it, like you don't need to be eating, you know, 3,000 calories of burgers and fries that have, you know, 6,000 milligrams of sodium, but like lightly salt some of your meals. Go watch the pre-workout video where I talk about having, I believe, a 1/4 teaspoon to a 1/2 teaspoon of salt pre-workout. So check that out as well. But, you know, lightly salt some of your meals. Have sodium. That will help you stay hydrated, 'cause when you're working out, you deplete your sodium. So if you replenish— I was gonna say replete. Replete. Replenish your sodium. That will help you stay hydrated. That will help you recover more, push more, push more blood flow, all those kinds of things, right? Help with muscle contractions, all those things. So that's number one. Potassium, again, just helps with overall— that's, that's a part of your hydration. So you can get that from potatoes. You can get it from spinach. You can get it from bananas. Like there's plenty of things you can do to get potassium. Feel free to do a quick Google search. Um, so potassium as well. And magnesium. Magnesium sometimes a bit harder to get for people. So if you wanted to, what a lot of my clients do, and this kind of goes into back what we talked about here, You can take like 200 to 400 milligrams of magnesium citrate before bed. That will help you with hydration, but it will also help you kick on your rest and digest nervous system, which if you take it before bed, you can get better sleep or better quality sleep, get to sleep sooner, so on and so forth, right? So sodium, potassium, magnesium. If you want to, you can take magnesium citrate before bed, 200 to 400 milligrams, 30 to 60 minutes before bed. That can definitely help you with sleep, which again, if you get better sleep, you're gonna recover better, so on and so forth, right? So that is the second one. Now, the third is going to be NEAT, which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. What this basically just means in the context of this video, just get more steps in. That's all. Just get more activity, get more steps in. If you go and work out in the morning and you sit at your desk all day for the rest of the day and get no steps, Which I'm guilty of a lot. But if you do that, that is not very good for recovery because you're not getting adequate blood flow throughout your body. Like, for example, when you get up and you take even something as short as a 5 or 10-minute walk, that's gonna help push nutrients throughout your body. It's gonna help, uh, uh, de— or it's, it's gonna help, um, quote unquote detox your body from those like leftover lactic acid, those leftover nutrients that were in your muscles that are your, Your muscle cells are damaged, right? Because you broke them down during your workout. So getting up, getting some movement, whether it's riding a bike or getting a walk or whatever the case may be, that can help you with overall blood flow, which is going to then help push new nutrients, which is going to help facilitate recovery, get out old nutrients, which is going to help again facilitate recovery. Because if there's old nutrients in the muscles, you're not going to get new nutrients and you can't have that process, right? So increasing your NEAT. I always tell my clients, try to get around, you know, Try to get around 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day, anywhere in between there. If you're doing that on a consistent basis, you are getting very, very good NEAT and you're going to help yourself recover from that workout. Now, on to the least most important things, which these are probably the things you hear the most, which, shocker, in the same way you hear things like carbs are the devil and like they're actually not the devil and you can eat carbs and still lose weight, the mainstream media Um, wants you to hear. Once, once you— the mainstream media pushes what they want you to hear. So number 1, least important, foam rolling. And let me make myself very clear. If you enjoy foam rolling and you do it and it makes you feel better and whatever the case may be, mazel tov, keep doing it. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you not to do it. I'm just gonna tell you it's not as important for recovery as you may think. Because you sitting there foam rolling your body and just like laying on this roller going back and forth, how much do you really think that can do for you? And actually, most people think it's like breaking down muscle tissue and like it's really not. One of the biggest things with foam rolling is it helps actually, it helps kick on the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system. So that would be why you would be recovering, 'cause like that foam rolling That physical touch is what helps. Honestly, it's going to sound crazy, but that's why sex can help as well, but it's a whole different topic. That's why that physical touch— we're going to talk about one other thing here with physical touch, but that's why it would help you. Again, it's really not that big of a deal. I see people in the gym foam rolling for 30 minutes post-workout or 30 minutes pre-workout. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? That 30 minutes could be spent so much better time than you sitting there foam rolling your glutes for 30 minutes. Or foam rolling your lower back, which is just not a smart idea in general. Foam rolling, top 1 for least important. Again, if you enjoy doing it, I'm not going to tell you to stop doing it. I'm just going to tell you it's not as important as you probably think, and I really wouldn't spend more than 5 minutes a day foam rolling because it's really just not that big of a deal. Now, number 2, talking about physical touch in sex. I don't know we were going to talk about that here. Here in this video. But massages, again, listen, if you listen, who doesn't enjoy getting a fucking massage, right? If you enjoy getting massage, listen, I'm definitely gonna tell you, I'm definitely not gonna tell you not to get a massage, but I will tell you they're not that important for recovery. And again, the main reason that helps you recover from your workouts would be the physical touch of getting a massage is gonna help turn on that rest and digest parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system, which is going to help you push out old nutrients, bring new blood flow to that area, so on and so forth. Right? And so it's not like don't do it. It's just, I would focus on all of these 6 things we talked about before you focus on going to get a massage. Like the 2 things I hear people talk about, they're like, I got to foam roll more. And I mean, I got to go get a massage to work out my knots. And it's just like, listen, um, if you're sleeping 4 hours a night, night and you're doing P90X every single day and you're never walking around and you're eating 30 grams of protein, I don't fucking care. You can get a massage every hour of every fucking day, like if you were that rich to do that. Like, that's great, but you're still not going to recover from your workouts because your workout program sucks and you're not sleeping and you're not eating protein. So go get massages, awesome, but you need to focus on these 6 things and these 6 things need to be checked off first before you even think about foam rolling Or massaging. So those are the 2 things. Now the last one, I'm going to kind of link some things together here. I do want to talk about like massage gun where like that's probably all over the internet where it's like this massage gun, you just put it, you just fucking drill your stomach with it and it'll fucking massage your abs or whatever the case may be. Like, again, anything that you are like doing to your body, whether it's a foam rolling or massaging or massage gun, like That's not going to be nearly as effective as doing things for your body. So doing things like getting more sleep, doing things like walking, doing things like eating more protein. Those things are harder. It takes more time, it takes more effort, but shocker, those things that take more time and more effort are going to yield a bigger result, right? So those like massage guns or those like, you know, sitting in cryotherapy or taking cold showers, like, Listen, sure, whatever, like whatever. But if you don't have these 6 things in check first, all of those like things that people try to push you for marketing and get you to buy— and again, notice over here, I don't think any of these things, literally none of these things are anything you have to buy. Like none of these things. So that should tell you like these things over here that you gotta buy, those are probably not as effective. Last one, BCAs, they do fucking nothing. BCAs do fucking nothing for you. I don't even know why they're made, but those do fucking nothing for you at all. But again, all those things that are like, oh, buy this and you'll get better workout recovery, typically you're not gonna get better workout recovery from those because the things you don't gotta buy are gonna yield a better result for you. So guys, that was the video today. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, concerns, please feel free to drop below. Again, if you want to, feel free to head out or head to my channel and check out the video on how to create Create a proper workout program because again, if you're not following a proper workout program, you are, you know, you're fucked basically. I'm sorry for the language, but you're fucked basically. So get a proper workout program. Again, if you have any questions, concerns, drop below. If you enjoyed the video, give it a thumbs up. If you liked the video, that's give it a thumbs up too. If you like the channel, subscribe to the channel. And other than that, thank you for watching and we'll talk soon. Bye.