Most athletes are diligent enough with their workouts to incorporate at least one, if not two, rest days into their workouts to maximize their gains. Rest days are important because they provide much-needed time for muscles to recover from constant use and allow growth and regeneration to occur.
Active recovery is another type of recovery period where you engage in low-intensity exercise such as walking, light gardening, or mopping the floor instead of being sedentary. Research is beginning to uncover the benefits of active recovery that may actually outweigh those of rest in terms of muscle strengthening.
One of the reasons active recovery is a great alternative means of recovery is that it helps reduce lactic acid buildup in muscles faster than normal rest, when done directly after exercise. This allows you to achieve higher power output for the duration of your workout and will lead to additional strength gains.
Active recovery will not affect the recovery period like overtraining, when your muscles stop adapting due to overuse of specific exercises. In fact, it helps by having positive effects on physiological recovery, as well as helping blood circulation throughout the body. This helps pump out lactic acid and bring in additional oxygen, vitamins and minerals while reducing recovery time.
Active recovery can come in the form of low-intensity aerobic exercise, or it can go a step further using advanced technique. A great bodybuilding tip for active recovery is to lower the weights and increase the repetitions you normally use to help stimulate increasing amounts of muscle growth. For our example, we’ll examine the chest press. On the first day, you perform the chest press at your maximum weight capacity. Let’s say you can do 3 sets of 10 reps with 100 pounds. Now, on day two, you obviously won’t be able to perform the same workout because your muscles will be extremely fatigued. We could perform an active recovery by increasing the repetitions and lowering the weight, for example, performing 3 sets of 15 repetitions at 60 lbs.
You’ll effectively target both your slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers, which not only helps with recovery, but can mean you’ll make gains in a faster amount of time than you thought possible. Try it for yourself by adding active recovery days to your workouts and see if you don’t start to make faster progress than before.