What are Active Recovery Workouts?
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Photo by Tim Samuel
By: Mark Sisson
Back when I was competing at an elite level of marathon and triathlon, we paid lip service to rest and recovery, but recovery looked mostly like lying on the couch for hours on end with a gallon of ice cream resting on my chest. I poured all my energy into training sessions such that I had nothing left in the tank on off days. Even basic household chores were a big ask.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have made more of an effort to move on my off days, incorporating more active recovery instead of the passive, frankly slothful recovery I favored at the time.
I suspect even the average fitness buff now understands that the real fitness gains don’t happen in the gym or on the track; they happen during the recovery period. You get stronger, fitter, faster thanks to the processes the body undertakes to repair damage caused by exercise and to prepare for your next bout. However, I still see athletes at all levels from general fitness enthusiasts to weekend warrior endurance athletes to high-level competitors resisting recovery. They feel guilty on days they don’t train. When they’re too busy to hit the gym, or accumulated soreness or fatigue forces them to take a day off, they worry that they’re losing all their hard-won gains.
So they’re usually happy to learn that taking days totally off isn’t necessary, or even ideal, for optimizing recovery and long-term performance. It’s usually better to keep moving on recovery days. You can and should hit the gym or hop on your bike between workouts, provided you move at a far lower intensity.
What is Active Recovery?
When people extol the virtues of active recovery, they are actually referring to three different things:
Recovering between sets or reps within a single workout. Think walking between sprint repetitions to bring your heart rate down instead of sitting down on the track.
Recovering at the end of a workout, as in an extended cooldown. For example, doing an easy spin on a stationary bike and a few minutes of dynamic stretching to end your sprint session.
Using movement on your off days—days you don’t have a formal training session planned—to enhance recovery.
We’ll focus on the latter today, but the goal of all three is fundamentally the same. Exercise creates tissue damage and burns through fuel, including intramuscular glycogen. That physical damage and the process of cellular metabolism create byproducts like lactate in the muscles and bloodstream and lead to inflammation, DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness), and fatigue. Active recovery increases circulation to working tissues (delivering nutrients and speeding up the clearance of waste products), reduces soreness, and improves perceptions of fatigue so athletes are ready to hit their next training session with more vigor.
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