6 Recovery Mistakes Everyone Makes (And How To Avoid Them)

Your dedication and effort in the gym are crucial for building strength and muscle. However, it’s the post-workout recovery phase that truly shapes your results.

Failure to fully recover from your training can be detrimental to your progress. In fact, it can reverse your hard-earned results, decreasing size and strength and depleting your endurance.

As a seasoned personal trainer, I’ve pinpointed six recovery mistakes that almost everyone makes. These basic slip-ups can steal away the gains you rightfully deserve from your hard work at the gym. The good news is they are all easily fixable, offering a promising path to better results.

6 Most Common Recovery Mistakes

Here is an in-depth look at each of these mistakes:

1. Skipping Rest Days

When it comes to building muscle, improving fitness levels, and getting stronger, more is always not better. Yet, I often see guys hitting their favorite body parts (usually chest or biceps) day after day in a desperate attempt to make fast gains.

But the gains never come.

When you exercise, you place stress on your body. The stress response begins with the alarm stage. In this stage, the body releases stress hormones to prepare for the new challenge. Then comes the resistance stage, in which the body adapts to regain balance.

If this stage is not handled correctly with adequate rest, recovery, and recuperation, it leads to the exhaustion stage. The continued stress results in hormonal imbalance and negative changes to the muscle tissue that make the person weaker and less healthy.

Recovery is what stops us from progressing into the exhaustion stage.

There are four stages of workout recovery:

• Stage One: A couple hours after your workout, you experience very high fatigue due to glycogen depletion, high cortisol levels, and reduced bureau activity.
• Stage Two: This stage starts about two hours after the workout and lasts 24-48 hours. It is where essential recovery occurs. ATP energy and glycogen stores return to pre-workout levels, and your body increases oxygen intake.
• Stage Three: Your body enters the adaptive phase 36-72 hours after your exercise session. Your muscles adapt to the training stress by getting slightly bigger and stronger.
• Stage Four: This stage is called supercompensation. It only happens if you have failed to rest, in which case the gains from stage three will be lost, and you’ll be back to square one.

Unless you provide your muscles with rest, they cannot repair themselves during stage three of recovery. Instead of getting bigger, your muscles will stagnate or even get smaller. You’ll also fail to improve your strength and endurance.

• If you are training for muscle and strength gains, you must wait 48-72 hours before working the same muscle group again.
• If you are training for endurance or cardio fitness, you should allow 24 hours of rest between workouts.

Skipping rest days will also increase the risk of overuse injury. These types of injuries build up over time and then flare up whenever you perform a movement. An example is elbow tendinitis, which causes pain whenever you do a bench press or push-ups.

You’re far less likely to suffer this type of injury when you schedule rest days that give the affected muscle group a complete break.

Failing to include a rest day in your weekly schedule may also result in mental fatigue.

Having a day without exercise allows your mind to unwind and recharge. This mental break enhances focus and motivation when you return to your workout routine, ensuring you can perform at your best.

2. Neglecting Sleep

As a personal trainer, I often see people spending a lot of money on supplements to boost muscle growth. At the same time, many of them are abusing a far more important part of the muscle growth equation — sleep!

Sleep is probably the most underappreciated aspect of muscle growth. You will never reach your fitness and body transformation potential without a regular quality sleep pattern.

When you fall asleep, your metabolism changes.

Your rate of metabolism refers to the speed of energy production. This rate drops by as much as 15 percent when we are sleeping. That’s because we do not need as much energy to survive while sleeping.

This reduced energy demand allows the body to focus on rebuilding and repairing the body. During this time, the micro-tears and other damage to your muscle fibers created by your workout are addressed by the body.

The body is designed to optimize the production of key anabolic hormones while we sleep to promote overnight muscle recovery.

Most of your testosterone is produced while you are sleeping. So, if you’re only getting small amounts of sleep, your body won’t be making as much testosterone as it can.

In a 2015 study, men who only got 5.5 hours of sleep per night for a week were shown to have testosterone production decreases by 10-15% compared to when they were sleeping 7-9 hours per night. [1]

Seven Ways to Get Better Sleep

1. Avoid exercising within three hours before bedtime.
2. Avoid taking stimulants like caffeine after 4 pm.
3. Don’t eat within two hours of going to bed.
4. Make your evening meal smaller.
5. Keep gadgets (including your phone) out of the bedroom.
6. Read a book in bed.
7. Maintain a cool bedroom environment of between 60 and 67 degrees F.

3. Poor Post-Workout Nutrition

Working out depletes your glycogen stores and causes micro-tears in your muscle tissue. You won’t make progress unless you provide the raw material needed to address these issues.

Yet, many people fail to satisfy their body’s post-workout nutritional needs. They fail to fulfill the body’s need for glycogen, amino acids, and the other essential nutrients required for muscle recovery.  As a result, they hinder their ability to recover effectively and maximize the benefits of their workout sessions.

Here’s a breakdown of what you should be putting into your body after your workout:

• Within thirty minutes of your workout, eat a recovery snack to provide the carbohydrates you need to restore glycogen levels and replenish electrolytes.
• Within two hours of your workout, have a balanced meal that includes at least 30 grams of protein.

Eating a clean, balanced diet every day is your best approach to recovery nutrition.

You cannot out-train a poor diet. Concentrating on fruits, vegetables, and animal and plant proteins will give you the nutritional firepower to crush your workouts and supply the building blocks for recovery.

Five Great Post-Workout Recovery Snacks

1. Bagel with jam, cream cheese, peanut butter, or a slice of turkey
2. Smashed banana on toast
3. Fruit and yogurt
4. Oatmeal with soymilk, walnut and blueberries
5. Toasted slices of sweet potato, topped with almond butter and cinnamon

Before we move on from the subject of nutrition, I’d like to address alcohol consumption. Alcohol will interfere with your recovery, including the vital replenishment of glycogen stores. It will also have a dehydrating effect on your body and add empty calories.

Don’t let your love of alcohol undo your gym progress.

4. Not Drinking Enough Water

You must stay hydrated during your workout by sipping from a water bottle between sets. But post-workout hydration is just as important, especially if you are a heavy sweater.

When you sweat during a workout, you lose water weight. Unless you replace that lost water, your body’s fluid balance will be negatively affected. You’ll also lose electrolytes, such as magnesium and sodium, essential for fluid balance and muscle and nerve function.

Lack of water intake during and after your workout can also lead to dehydration. This will cause your heart rate to increase as the heart pumps a smaller volume of blood to the muscles. You’ll also probably experience digestive discomfort.

You don’t need to buy expensive energy drinks to replace fluids and electrolytes post-workout. Simply drink plenty of water. Even better is coconut water, which contains electrolytes like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, making it an excellent natural choice for rehydrating after exercise.

A well-hydrated body will work much better than one that is semi-dehydrated. As a result, replenishment and repair nutrients will reach your damaged muscle cells faster, making recovery and gains more likely.

You can check if you’re drinking enough water by looking at the color of your urine. If it is light-colored or clear, you’re doing well. The darker it is, the closer you are to dehydration.

I recommend drinking a gallon of water daily.

Find your daily water intake here.

5. Overlooking Active Recovery

Research has shown that doing some light exercise that is unrelated to your workout helps speed up the recovery process. This is known as active recovery. Other forms of active recovery include massage and cold and hot water immersion.

A 2018 study published in the Frontiers in Physiology found that active recovery can reduce lactic acid build-up, increase blood flow, and speed up waste removal from muscle cells. [2]

Active recovery may involve doing light exercises, such as push-ups or air squats. You might also go for a bike ride or shoot some hoops. Swimming is another good choice.

Keep your active recovery exercise low-impact and relatively low-demanding. It should also be fun. Doing so will help increase blood flow through your muscles and reduce the effect of DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness). It has even been shown to reduce post-exercise muscle strength loss.

6. Not Managing Stress

People who exercise and have a hectic job are often so busy that they never get time to relax. As soon as their workout is over, they are on to the next thing on their To-Do list. Even when they do get the opportunity to relax physically, their minds are still racing from one thing to the other.

This leads to stress build-up and puts you on the fast track to burnout. It certainly does not promote recovery.

Meditation lets you step out of your busy routine and take a bird’s-eye view of your life. This helps you assess your training status and detect signs of overtraining more effectively. The more you meditate, the better attuned you will become to your body.

In addition to providing you with the mental space to slow down and examine yourself, meditation will benefit your physical recovery. The very act of scanning your body while practicing breathing exercises will relax your muscles, relieve tension, and increase blood circulation. Your mind will also become more relaxed, and you will feel more in control of yourself.

Counting meditation is a good entry point for the newbie. Begin by sitting in a comfortable position. You don’t have to be cross-legged, but you should be upright rather than reclining. Whether you close your eyes or not is up to you. Begin with 5 minutes of meditation, and gradually increase to double or triple that length.

Count backward from 30, timing your count with your breathing. Inhale on a number and then exhale on the next number down. If your mind starts to wander before you get to 1, go back to 30 and start again. As the count gets easy, increase your starting number.

Wrap Up

You work too hard on your fitness to allow your gains to be diluted by poor recovery habits. Doing so would be like filling a leaky bucket with water.

Take a few minutes to analyze your post-workout habits. If you’re making any of the mistakes we’ve identified, make the necessary changes to give your body the environment it needs to recover fully from your workouts.

References

1. Leproult R, Van Cauter E. Effect of 1 week of sleep restriction on testosterone levels in young healthy men. JAMA. 2011 Jun 1;305(21):2173-4. doi: 10.1001/jama.2011.710. PMID: 21632481; PMCID: PMC4445839.
2. Dupuy O, Douzi W, Theurot D, Bosquet L, Dugué B. An Evidence-Based Approach for Choosing Post-exercise Recovery Techniques to Reduce Markers of Muscle Damage, Soreness, Fatigue, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis. Front Physiol. 2018 Apr 26;9:403. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.00403. PMID: 29755363; PMCID: PMC5932411.

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