Down-regulation after training
Why taking a few minutes to cool- & calm down could push your recovery (and training) to the next level.
Most of you will know that to get the most out of your training, your recovery needs to be on point. Yet sometimes we seem to forget that this process of recovery starts the moment we finish our last rep and set*. When talking about recovery, we often tend to think of things separate from our training sessions like sleep, nutrition, massages and stuff like that. Yet easy things like cooling & calming down are often overlooked. In this article I will discuss why you should care about down-regulation in the first place, and I will go into some easy ways to down-regulate after training.
To understand how we can kickstart recovery and boost our training results, let’s have a quick look at how the two interact
From a high-level perspective, training is performing a task with the objective to become better at that or a related task. This can resolute in us getting faster, stronger, bigger, more accurate or more enduring. This process of “getting better” is what we call adaptation to the training stimulus. In order to create an adaptation, the training stimulus has to be challenging enough for our body to respond. Training can have a whole range of effects on our body like increasing the body’s demand for energy, temporarily disrupt homeostasis, and potentially create some (small) structural damage to certain tissues. These things are interpreted by our body as a threat, and in response, our body or more specifically our autonomic nervous system enters a stage of “fight or flight”. This means that the sympathetic part of our nervous system becomes dominant.
When this happens our body now prioritizes dealing with the current “challenge” over any other functions like repair or immune functions. As an example, the body raises the presence of certain hormones in the circulatory system like cortisol & epinephrine (adrenalin) to assist in the mobilization of energy (catabolism), increases oxygen intake to help with energy production and raises alertness for quicker reactions. As a result of this increase in sympathetic activity, many more processes will commence in order to deal with the “threat”.
Now although this sounds scary, this is nothing to be afraid of. Our bodies are very well adapted to switch between “fight or flight” mode and the “rest and digest” mode (the other stage of our autonomic nervous system). It is actually during the recovery of training stimulus that we get stronger and fitter.
After a period of disruption, our body normally returns back to the “rest and digest” stage. This means that the parasympathetic part of the nervous system becomes more dominant. In this mode, our body works hard to restore balance in the body by doing things like, repairing any damaged tissue (anabolism), fighting inflammation, ramping the immune system back up and restoring chemical storages.
But it doesn’t stop with just repairing the damage. Our bodies actually work to improve things like tissue strength, signalling for muscle contractions and chemical reserves to be able to better deal with the challenge next time. This is likely the main mechanism behind getting stronger, fitter and building more muscle. Now it is important to realize that this just gives a rough overview of how the autonomic nervous system actually works and that the numerous processes are much more intricate and complex than just described.
But it should be pretty obvious now that in order to improve and get stronger we need a training stimulus that pushes our body into a “fight or flight” stage, followed by a period of “rest and digest” to deal with the damage and get stronger.
Benefits of improved recovery:
So why is all this important?
Once you realize that your training progress is actualized through your recovery, you can simply infer that the sooner you enter the recovery phase, “rest and digest”, the sooner you start getting stronger and fitter. This can be explained in 3 ways:
1. Improved/Quicker recovery = more frequent training
Often, especially at the higher levels, the frequency at which we can train certain skills or lifts is determined by our ability to recover. You don’t sprint all out each day, because you simply can’t recover quickly enough to have consecutive high-quality sessions.
In the best case, you’d have a lot of very low-quality sprinting workouts due to a lack of force output as a result of incomplete recovery, and in the worst case you’d simply get injured because of the overstimulation of poorly recovered tissue. The same goes for weightlifting, unless you’re Bulgarian and/or using their special candy, you won’t max out the same lift every day. So, the quicker your recovery the more frequent you can have high-intensity, high-quality workouts or workouts in general. Which will likely lead to better and quicker results
2. Improved/More complete recovery = more effective training
Although ideally, we would often only stimulate a muscle again once it’s fully recovered, this is not always feasible or practical within a training program. Often we must be satisfied with less-than-complete recovery. Which, although not ideal, isn’t necessarily a reason to skip training altogether.
Take, for instance, our forearm muscles. Even in a classic push/pull split these muscles will always be stimulated, be it indirectly. Yet we have found that a push/pull split can still be an effective way of structuring training. This doesn’t mean however that it's always optimal. Potentially, you could get more out of your training, if you’d find a way to improve recovery on those muscles. Which can potentially be accomplished by speeding up the onset of recovery through downregulation.
Then there is the effect training can have on chemicals like neurotransmitters which impact the ability of our central nervous system to send and receive signals and can have many downstream effects. After numerous days of (intense) training depletion of these chemicals can lead to an overall reduction of output, regardless of the body parts involved. It’s pretty easy to see how in these cases, the ability to recover more, in between sessions, will lead to higher-quality training and thus better results.
3. Improved/More “overall” recovery = less injury
This one should speak for itself. The better we recover the less risk there is for things like overuse injuries. And we all know how detrimental injuries can be to the training process. The best examples are overuse injuries which, by definition are injuries that result from incomplete recovery through an imbalance between stress and recovery. Increasing recovery between stressors will improve the resiliency of the tissue, thereby decreasing the risk of overuse injuries.
So, all this leads to the conclusion that the sooner you can start recovering, the better you train, and the better your results. This is why it’s important that the moment you are done stressing your body, you actively shift the focus to recovery.
How to kickstart recovery after training?
The process of kickstarting post-workout recovery can very roughly be divided into two components. One deals more with the immediate consequences of exercise and focuses on things like waste-product removal, oxygen replenishment and the lowering of your heart rate. You could say, it is focussed more on “cleaning up the damage”, while the other deals more with the actual “rebuilding phase recovery”. This is when the tissues are restored and things like glycogen reserves are replenished. Now keep in mind that these distinctions are metaphorical and these processes aren’t actually that black and white. Additionally, the quality of recovery in general heavily depends on things like good nutrition and sleep and is an ongoing process in between workouts. Yet, how do we help this process get started?
Active cooling down
The first thing we want to do is deal with the more acute effects of our training stimulus. By doing some easy cyclical work like cycling, walking or light jogging you can stimulate the removal of by-products from the areas that have been working, and supply them with new and fresh nutrients. By doing these activities at a low intensity we stimulate blood circulation, thereby speeding up the flushing and replenishing process, without adding new stressors. Just a few minutes of this form of active recovery has been shown to improve recovery significantly. During the active recovery part, we slowly want to bring the heart-rate back down to roughly below 100 bmp before we start our more passive forms of down-regulation.
“Passive” cooling down
After you’ve gone through the more active part of the cooling down it is time to down-regulate your central nervous system even more and help your body go into a state of parasympathetic dominance, “rest and digest”.
Now it is important to realize that this part is often a bit more personal. What works and what doesn’t is very personal as certain methods can be arousing to one, and relaxing to another. Things like soft foam rolling, or light stretching could work if utilized properly and even a hot or cold shower can help for certain people. But what seems to be most effective across the board is breathing. Deliberate breathing.
Research has shown that taking active control over the breath and establishing a relaxed and controlled breathing rhythm is a highly effective way of increasing parasympathetic activity. It is therefore one of the best and easiest ways to down-regulate the central nervous system (CNS) after a training session.
Now there are many different methods for relaxed breathing, and their effectiveness differs per person. The key is to find one that works for you, and helps you relax. Two easy methods I like to use with my clients are:
1-to-2 breathing For every 1 second of inhaling you exhale for 2. For instance, 4-seconds inhale followed by an 8-second exhale.
Box breathing you breathe in, hold, breathe out, and hold, then repeat. Each part should be done for an x number of seconds. For instance, 4 sec in, 4-sec hold, 4 sec out, 4-sec hold.
Now ideally you’d perform these breathing exercises for a few minutes after training, but it is important to remember that in this case, a little is better than nothing. So, even if you can only squeeze in 10 mindful breaths, you will still positively contribute to your recovery.
Things to avoid
Now think about everything we’ve discussed so far: If you want to get fitter, you need to recover, so you need to get into your “rest and digest” state after training. However, your CNS doesn’t magically realize that your training is over whenever you stop your workout. Way too often do we rush back into work or daily life after our workout. If you move from one stressor, say a workout, straight into another stressor, say a work call, your CNS might never flip the switch and move into the desired recovery mode. Because our CNS doesn’t discriminate between sorts of stress. This makes taking a short moment after our training even more important, it gives us the chance to activate our recovery.
Obviously, there is no way to avoid getting into stressful situations throughout the day. And true, our physiology isn’t so black-and-white, so you are still recovering a little while taking your work-call. Yet by taking a little time to down-regulate, we are setting ourselves up for success. Not only are you getting more out of your hard work through better recovery, you actually “free-up” some capacity to deal with other stressors later in the day. This is why down-regulation after training is an invaluable tool!
Now, before I wrap it up, there is one little note of caution I’d like to mention. When choosing your down-regulation modality it is important to ask yourself whether it is speeding up recovery, or stopping the adaptation process. Which are 2 different things. For instance, when we completely remove all inflammation that results from training, we can actually remove part of the desired adaptation. Which, contrary to popular belief, is a critical part of the adaptation process. Things like ice baths and cold plunges, for instance, are great recovery tools yet when used too close to the training stimulus they seem to interfere by cutting short the inflammation process. And might therefore not be your best choice. We want to improve our bodi’s ability to respond to stress, not remove the stress altogether. This makes it important to be aware of the impact of a specific recovery tool and how it interacts with your training.
So, to wrap it all up. Taking a few minutes after your training to down-regulate can speed up recovery and allow you to train more, and/or better, while potentially lowering your risk of injury. Easy things, like a few minutes of cyclical work to “flush out” your muscles, and/or a short breathing routine can be all you have to do to take your recovery-game to the next level. And by now we know, that better recovery = better results.
If you’re interested in applying these techniques to your own training. Click on this link, to find out how I can help you!
*Arguably the process of recovery is a continuous process that starts