muscle recovery?..........?

Muscle recovery is highly individual and depends on a number of factors.

Typically the smaller muscles recover more quickly than the larger muscles, depending on the intensity of your training.

However, keep in mind many of your muscles are worked without you even knowning it. For example, you might train your biceps today. If you train your back tomorrow, you are actually training your biceps again. Any time you bend your arm at the elbow, you are involving your biceps, so a back workout will work your biceps as well. Any time you are doing a standing exercise such as a standing curl, press, etc, your abdominal and lower back muscles are stabilizing your torso, and they get a workout as well.

The only way to really optimize your recovery is to keep a detailed training journal. Light workouts may allow you to recover within 24 hours while extremely heavy leg workouts can take up to a week for the body to fully recover from. Keeping a journal and varying the amount of time you rest will show you over time how long or short you can wait between workouts and still see improvements over time.

As for recovery, people are always focused on protein supplements, etc, but the real basics are going to be quality foods, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and above all a quality multivitamin. These nutrients are all part of the recovery process. Add to that adequate rest.

Post-workout a shake that is high in carbs is important. Most people mistakenly take a protein shake, but your protein needs immediately after a workout are minimal. Your body doesn't suddenly start building protein/muscle mass right away, this is a process that happens over time. You are, however, depleting glycogen stores (carbohydrate in the muscle) so carbohydrate with some protein is probably ideal. Some people swear by glutamine for recovery, but in my experience it's really not necessary unless you are training at an elite level.

Jeremy Likness

1

There are a couple other things you can do to assist your muscle recovery in addition to what you're doing now:

1) Make SURE you get good sleep.

2) Gently massage the areas you worked out to improve blood flow to the area.

3) Take a Zinc-Magnesium complex before bed EVERYDAY.

4) Split your protein drinks so that you have one before a workout and one right after.

5) Creatine can also help a lot by blocking lactic acid build up in your muscles after a workout.

The way you can tell if its okay to workout your arms (for example) after two days is whether or not you feel any pain or tightness there. If you do feel ANY at all, wait till the next day or you'll be over-training and your muscle will actually break down.

it's dependent on your program, general stress in your life, etc.

*generally* it takes about 48 hours to have muscles recover. You don't really want to be doing arms every two days though. what does your whole program look like?

for recovery you can try a mix like Xtend which is just basically a large dose of BCAA's. You can get this in any great protein powder though so it's not 'really' necessary. Get some oats/complex carb and your shake and you'll be set for recovery after that.

creatine and protein will help recovery quick