Post-Exercise Recovery & Why You Should Be Doing It

Whether you just completed a race, tournament, game, or an intense training session, recovery should be your number 1 priority. Recovery is going to allow you to bounce back quicker, increase your performance, and decrease your injury risk. Athletes need more than to return back to their normal state before exercise. They need to be able to increase and adapt to a higher training load. 

Competition and training involves repeated muscular contractions which increases fatigue and causes micro-damage in the muscles leading to delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Delayed onset muscle soreness is the pain and stiffness that you can feel post-exercise and can persist for 2 days - 1 week post-exercise. Your injury risk increases when your muscles are fatigued and have difficulty adapting to the movements and stressors being placed on it. 

There are different ways to facilitate post-exercise recovery including massage, cryotherapy, intermittent compression, Graston, and stretching. Cryotherapy and compression has been shown to reduce DOMS related symptoms up to 96 hours post-recovery treatment. Using cryotherapy and/or compression post-exercise will give you a greater chance of performing better the next day due to decreased soreness, muscular fatigue, and increased restoration of those broken down muscles. 

Delaware Sports Medicine is now happy to announce that we offer post-exercise recovery sessions! We want to get our athletes back into play as quickly as possible. Come try out our new recovery sessions after a tournament, game, race, or whenever you feel like you need it! These sessions may include NormaTec compression, cryotherapy, Graston, stretching, and massage to help your recovery. 

-Sydney Bell, MS, LAT, ATC, CPT