Active recovery: how you can improve your regeneration

Why is regeneration so important?

If you exercise regularly, you need an individual training plan, a balanced diet and sufficient sleep and recovery. The regeneration pyramid shows us what plays a role in this: Nutrition and mental recovery as the basis and at the top: sleep. With these three pillars, the body can regenerate and prepare for the next training session.

And this is precisely why the regeneration phase is so important for our body and our training progress. In both weight training and endurance training, we provide targeted stimuli for our body. The muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments, as well as our metabolism and central nervous system, constantly adapt to these stimuli in order to cope with them better. This adaptation takes place during the regeneration phase.

Here, the glycogen stores in our muscles and liver are replenished through nutrition and important amino acids are stored in the muscles. This prepares your body ideally for the next training session.

If this phase fails, your body heals less well, is less able to process training impulses and cannot replenish its stores sufficiently. The result: you burn out, stop making progress or even suffer a drop in performance.

Active regeneration: how can it help us?

Always training hard and barely allowing ourselves a break is therefore neither healthy nor does it help us to achieve the desired peak performance. We need sleep, rest and recovery in order to reach our full potential in sport.

But there is more than one type of regeneration. After a hard day's training, we often just want to flop down on the couch and have a cozy movie night. And that's certainly not a bad idea. It allows us to relax and recharge our batteries.

But in addition to this so-called passive recovery, there is also active recovery. This means that we recover while remaining active and moving.

You don't push your body too hard and never go to your limit. Suitable sports and movements for active recovery are those that don't put too much strain on your body and only place moderate demands on your cardiovascular system.

As a rule of thumb, you can remember this: The intensity of your regenerative activity should never be more than 70 percent of your normal maximum performance and may also be well below this.

Advantages of active regeneration

During active regeneration, the gentle movement of the muscles stimulates your blood circulation. This allows damaged tissue and metabolic waste products to be broken down and removed more quickly.

More nutrients also circulate in the blood and muscle regeneration is improved. Activating the muscles also accelerates the removal of fluid in the tissue.

Furthermore, the accumulated lactate in the blood is removed more quickly and the build-up of lactic acid in the muscles is reduced. This also reduces muscle soreness.

Improve regeneration: What is active recovery?

Exercise during your active recovery phase can be tailored to your training plan. For example, when preparing for a marathon, you can go for a relaxed run or a leisurely walk on recovery days.

According to our QA expert, you can also incorporate sports that are not normally part of your training. For runners, a leisurely bike ride, swimming or inline skating are suitable. This allows you to train other skills for a change, bring a breath of fresh air into your training and prevent mental exhaustion caused by hard, monotonous running.

The following methods are particularly suitable for active regeneration:

1. Cool down and stretching

The active recovery phase begins with a cool down after the training session. This can be a slow run after running training or a relaxed walk. The cool down can then be combined with a round of gentle stretching.

2. Yoga

Gentle yoga sessions are ideal for balancing the body on a break day. Here you will find peace and relaxation for body and mind and can gently stretch your entire musculoskeletal system. Yoga not only improves your flexibility, but also your blood circulation, helping to remove lactate and free radicals from your muscles and relieve inflammation.

3. Stability and mobility exercises

Stability training, a light core workout or dynamic mobility exercises can also be a useful addition to your training plan. They prepare your body for the next training session and can prevent injuries.

4. Massages, fascia rolls and blackrolls

Even if you don't move your muscles on your own, massages are part of active regeneration. They promote blood circulation and relax muscles that have been strained during training. With fascia rollers and black rolls, you can massage your muscles that have been irritated by training and loosen adhesions in the connective tissue.

5. Heat and cold therapy

The 'good old' tips such as saunas, the use of fascia rolls or ice baths are hotly debated today. While some swear by the relaxing effect of the sauna, others argue that sweating causes you to lose too much fluid.

Cold showers during Kneipp therapy or ice baths are also said to help with regeneration. The blood vessels are constricted here, which supposedly counteracts swelling and tissue decay. However, no positive effects on regeneration have been scientifically proven to date.

Despite the controversial effects of these methods, there are numerous athletes who find them relaxing and regenerative. So everyone has to find out for themselves what works and what doesn't.

How long to rest after training?

All of these methods can be used to make your break days more active and improve your recovery. But how long should you actually take a break between two training sessions?

According to Alexander Ferrauti, Professor of Training Science at Ruhr University Bochum, there is no universal answer to this question. How long our body needs for regeneration depends on age, training condition and training intensity.

While you can confidently ride an e-bike every day, the greater muscular strain of fast running or HIIT training requires at least one day off, according to the training expert.

When you train at high intensity, your glycogen stores are also depleted and these usually need at least 24 hours to replenish. It is therefore also important to support recovery with a balanced diet and sufficient fluids.

Listen to your body and adapt the rest phases and activities of your active regeneration to your physical condition. To avoid injuries and a drop in performance, we recommend resting one day more rather than one day too little. A longer recovery phase may be necessary, especially if you are in pain

The enduco app plans a training program individually tailored to you. Regeneration in the form of rest days is an integral part of this, according to our QA expert. The program's artificial intelligence uses various influencing factors from your last training sessions to plan a healthy and balanced training program with sufficient recovery time for you.

Improve training with active recovery

If you want to achieve top performance during training, you need to focus on more than just hard training sessions. Rest days, active regeneration and a balanced diet are essential to recover from training and prepare for the next training session.