7 Recovery Innovations to Incorporate Into Your Routine, Stat
Explore the benefits of cold plunges, LED light therapy, infrared blankets, and more.
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Curating a workout routine that syncs with your lifestyle and goals is uber-important, but prioritizing recovery is equally, if not more, substantial. Pros say that recovery plays a much larger role in your progress and mindset than you likely realize. That’s why we did a deep dive into recovery 101, as well as the latest innovations in recovery, such as light therapy, cold plunges, compression, and meditation to help your body—and your mind—recharge.
The Importance of Post-Workout Recovery
Creating — and maintaining — consistent post-workout recovery practices such as stretching, hydrating, sleeping, and getting all the right nutrients, are key to optimal performance. There are many benefits to prioritizing recovery, but simply setting yourself up for successful workouts in the future is paramount. “The reason recovery is so important is to feel good for your next workout,” explains Jordan Fernandez, a NASM-certified personal trainer and board member for the Trainer Academy CPT. “Getting proper nutrition, enough sleep, and limiting alcohol intake are the general things you know you should be doing for your health, but they are also the foundation of recovery. So, if you're not doing them, a lot of the other stuff is marginal at best.”
The bottom line: once you have the basics on lock, incorporating recovery innovations can be well worth it, but only if you feel the results. “A lot of the current research doesn’t necessarily say that, for example, an infrared sauna versus light cardio or foam rolling after a weight training session is better for your performance or that you’ll build more muscle,” he notes. “But if you feel better for your next workout, and therefore put in more effort, and body pain or soreness is not a limiting factor, then that has a direct advantage into how fast you can progress.” So the published research may not indicate that a specific modality is best, however, you can be the best barometer for what works (and what doesn’t) for your body.
Lance Parker, a Lululemon Studio trainer and personal trainer at Reload Physical Therapy and Fitness Studio in NYC says that if you take a class with him on a digital platform or 1:1, you’ll hear him say on repeat: You can't train what you don't recover from. “If all you do is train really, really hard all the time, you'll eventually just put your body in a perpetual state of being broken down,” he says.
Parker also backs up the importance of the tried and true when it comes to recovery — nutrition, hydration, and sleep. “These are all key things that you have to do to make sure that your body has the best chance to recover as quickly and as fully as possible,” he says. “If you don't give your body a proper amount of nutrients, you won't physically have the building blocks to build back up the tissue that you've stressed. Think about doing a strength workout where you're intentionally creating microtrauma with little tears in the muscle, and when those recover with enough time and nutrients, [your muscle] grows back stronger and are ready to take on even more.”
Recovery 101: 6 Basic Ways to Prioritize Recovery
Nutrition focused on your specific workout (i.e. nutrition for strength will be different than recovery post-long run)
Cold and heat therapy
Active recovery (stretching and light cardio)
Massage and percussion therapy
Jill Carnahan, M.D., a functional medicine expert in Louisville, Colorado, believes that “recovery starts with sleep. If you're not getting seven or more hours, you're missing out. There are so many studies that correlate mental health, cognition, overall resilience, immune system function, brain function, and more.”
If you’re looking to go beyond the basics and embrace technology to take your recovery game to the next level, look no further. Here are 7 high-tech ways to recover smarter and faster.
Infrared Technology
Infrared technology, best known in the form of infrared saunas, has become increasingly popular and accessible over the past few years. Instead of needing to book a time in a shared sauna or invest in an expensive (and very large) at-home sauna, there are now mats and blankets available to bring the recovery benefits of the heat (and light) home.
Dr. Carnahan advocates for the use of infrared technology not only for recovery from a workout but also for recovery from, well, life. “I'm a huge fan of infrared and believe it’s an incredibly powerful recovery technique specifically to enhance my sleep,” says Dr. Carnahan, who personally uses the Higher Dose Infrared PEMF Go Mat, which utilizes pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, on the low-level setting to induce better sleep via an increased core body temperature.
“There’s an additional benefit to infrared [saunas over steam saunas] because it goes very deep into the tissues,” notes Dr. Carnahan. She explains that infrared energy stimulates energy in cells, which in turn, amplifies the recovery process and can initiate the release of nitric oxide. This leads to a domino effect of healing from increased blood circulation because oxygen, nutrients, and anti-inflammatory compounds all support cellular regeneration.
Not everyone will necessarily feel the benefits of infrared technology (or enjoy the heat), but you may want to see if your other fitness tech devices provide any helpful metrics to support its use. “We now have access to so many devices that track our biorhythms, and with that data, we can take an intervention that will actually make a difference for our personal needs,” says Dr. Carnahan. “For me, after I started to use the PEMF mat, all of a sudden I saw on my tracker that my deep sleep went from 25 percent, which is great, to sometimes up to as much as 40 percent."
Cold Plunge
Submerging your body in freezing cold water (as fun as that sounds) can also aid in recovery. While many people start with a few seconds under a cold shower, if you’re looking to incorporate a cold plunge into your routine, it’s easier than ever to access. You can even order an inflatable and totally temporary pool for next-day delivery.
But you may ask yourself: is the pain worth it? “A cold plunge raises your neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine and makes you feel alive and invigorated, inducing a kind of natural high. That's why people love it,” says Dr. Carnahan. “But at the end of the day, it actually pulls down cortisol, our stress hormone, and that helps you fall asleep — which is why even if you do a plunge in the morning or afternoon, you’ll probably feel invigorated and get a lot of work done, but then at night you’re more likely to sleep better.”
A cold plunge can also help reduce inflammation leading to less soreness post-workout. Fernandez recommends plunging when you’re working toward a specific goal — such as a 5k or a half marathon — where minimizing inflammation post-workout is beneficial. “Let's say you know you're two weeks out or a week out from a performance-related event, it’s important in that timeframe for your body to feel better and be less sore,” says Fernandez. While incorporating a cold plunge into your training cycle can be key, it can also be an effective way to boost your overall wellness and functioning at any time of the year, if you can stand the chill.
LED Light Therapy
If minimizing pain and inflammation is your recovery goal, LED light therapy may help. At one time, this tech was only available in pro athlete locker rooms or at PT. Now, you can strap on an at-home LED wrap to target any area that’s giving you grief — anytime, anywhere. Try the DPL Flex Pad or Nushape Therapy Wrap.
“Red light is a powerful stimulant of mitochondria and creates more ATP [adenosine triphosphate, AKA source of cellular energy],” says Dr. Carnahan, who notes that the athletes she’s worked with often use LED therapy daily. “It's a really great way to quickly hack into producing more energy for healing and recovery.”
Fernandez explains that the scientific data on LED therapy for recovery is lacking. Some studies show that although athletes did feel better post-treatment, there was no measurable performance enhancement. But, he admits, the research could catch up. “I advocate the principle that if it’s helping you feel better and it’s not harmful, that's beneficial.”
Compression Boots
You’ve likely seen some of your favorite pros and fitfluencers snapping selfies while wearing moon boot-ish tech by brands such as Hyperice Normatic or Ballancer Pro. While getting some R&R in a recliner sounds lovely, what is the purpose of these compression boots? Simply put, says Parker, the point is to enhance blood flow. He points out that harnessing the power of innovations that enhance blood flow is key to aiding recovery. “What happens when you're working out, especially during a super high-intensity workout, is that your body releases stress hormones known as metabolites. When you increase blood flow, you can help extract some of those metabolites by bringing in fresh oxygenated blood to repair the muscles.”
Dr. Carnahan is pro-compression because of the effect it has on the lymphatic system, too. “We need to mobilize toxins out of our tissues and excrete them out of our body. The lymphatic system is a key route to excrete toxins,” she explains. However, she adds that you can replace high-tech (and often costly) compression technology and get similar benefits by simply reaching for a dry brush. “Dry brushing your skin can gently and effectively stimulate lymphatic flow, " says Carnahan.
Massage Guns and Foam Rolling
Although Therabody launched its infamous massage gun in 2016, it truly shot to social stardom around 2019. And since then many similar hand-held vibrational tools followed. What’s the obsession all about? The intense vibration produced by the convenient, hand-held tech is like having access to a deep massage right at your fingertips. Here’s why: There's something called the Golgi tendon organ (GTO), which are tree-like-looking sensory endings located in the area connecting tendons to muscles. These sensory endings “respond to the pressure or tension from foam rolling, deep massage, or a vibrational massage tool,” notes Fernandez. These techniques “can temporarily relax the muscle and increase the range of motion, which can be beneficial before or after a workout. Plus, research even shows that it can reduce soreness after a workout in particular.”
But Fernandez says you can get a similar effect from simply foam rolling. “Foam rolling can help relax or stimulate the GTOs,” he says. “So if you have a trigger point or maybe you did squats and your quads are screaming after your workout, working in with the roller will help the muscle relax as well as bring blood flow to the area.”
Mindfulness and Meditation
The recovery convo would not be complete without acknowledging the importance of mindfulness, as well as the pros of meditation. Now a common term and practice that’s easier than ever to hone in on thanks to countless apps begging you to shut down and be still — from Calm to MNDFL, to Headspace, and more. It's all about trying to down-regulate your nervous system, cortisol levels, and adrenaline levels, states Parker. “When you’re in a super busy mode, or if you just did an intense workout, your body's in fight or flight mode which means there’s a lot of cortisol running through your system. This puts you in a heightened, sympathetic state,” explains Parker. “Breathwork and meditation help you connect and shift into your parasympathetic nervous system, referred to as your rest and digest system, to get your entire body and mind into that process of recovery.”
Nervous System Regulation Apps
If you want to go beyond breathwork and mindful meditation to balance your nervous system, try Neurofit, an app that gives you a direct dial into tools that help keep your stress levels balanced. Every day the app prompts you to do a one-minute a.m. and p.m. self-check-in of your current state by tapping emotional barometers for various areas of life (money, relationships, career, and well-being) on a rainbow-colored ring. The options range from warm, loving, and compassionate to quiet and peaceful, or might be more along the lines of stressful, anxious, angry, or drained. Next, to more accurately track your nervous system, the app assesses your heart rate variability (via your index finger on the camera for one minute).
The result: real-time data to track the state of your nervous system with intel including heart rate variability, resting heart rate and what it means (if it’s elevated, it can be a marker of nervous system fatigue), and respiration rate. Plus, it offers two- to three-minute ‘balance training’ exercises that incorporate calm-down practices like tree-shaking movements with your arms, arm and leg squeezes, and heart-focused breathing.
“Your life is your workout life and all of the different life aspects affect how you're gonna show up in the gym,” says Beth Bishop, head trainer at Neurofit and CEO of The Phoenix Effect gym in Los Angeles, who often has her private clients use the app pre- and post-workout. “Remember, when your nervous system is out of whack, your emotions are also over the place and you’re more like to have hormonal imbalances, chronic fatigue, and injuries that don't heal. Plus, you can get into negative thought loops, so finding balance in your life and your nervous system will help speed up your recovery.”
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