By Pete Sisco

As I see it, the biggest problem searching for online information about muscle recovery after intense exercise is that so much of the material is aimed at selling nutritional supplements.

Every time a study is done that measures some aspect of muscle stimulation and recovery, like altered calcium balance in the muscle cells or rates of protein uptake, a new miracle supplement appears claiming to ’support’ the muscle recovery process based on these new findings. ‘Support’ is my favorite nutritional supplement word. It’s meaningless. Water supports just about every body function but drinking more of it won’t pack on muscle. The same goes for most of the ingredients in supplements. Meaningless.

The big picture is lifting really heavy weights (the only way to build new muscle) requires many days of recovery. And it’s not just muscle recovery. All those waste products have to be flushed through important organs like the liver and kidneys and those organs work at a relatively fixed rate. It takes time. Plus, the new muscle has to actually grow – and that’s tissue. Tissue growth is not very fast. How long does it take you to fully recover from a paper cut? It’s not easy to speed up that process.

I read an online article where the trainer was telling people to avoid high intensity lifting. His argument was it requires longer recovery and therefore you can’t train as often. Guess what? I don’t want to train as often as I can. I want to train the minimum I need to in order to get the results I want. That guy’s advice is like telling me if I avoid paved roads I can wash my car more often. No thanks.

How do you know you’ve recovered? You can lift a heavier weight. That’s easy, right? If you could perform a 5 second static hold of a 285 lb bench press last workout but you can’t get it off the pins this workout then you haven’t fully recovered. So why do a workout? If your body can already bench press 285, why mess around with less? How would that make you stronger?

What trips people up on recovery is that it’s a moving target. When you start out strength training you can’t lift much and your body can recover pretty quickly -one or two days in most cases. But as you get stronger the recovery is longer. I know people who are so strong they need six weeks or more before they can see improvement. So the cookie cutter advice of “3 days a week” is ridiculous. Unless you really love washing your car.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 6:54 am and is filed under exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.