How to Balance Workouts & Recovery
To ensure the quality of your workout, it’s crucial to balance exercise with adequate rest and recovery. Recovery is the period where your muscles, tissue and bones repair themselves after a Pilates class or workout session. Getting sufficient rest includes monitoring your pace during exertion. Rest periods between exercise helps your body grow muscle and recharge. Always give yourself time to rest and recover whenever you need it. Remember everyone is different, so be sure to listen to your body.
BALANCING WORKOUTS WITH RECOVERY
Journaling:
Sometimes reaching your goals isn’t always as clear-cut as you think. One common possession of those who’ve reached their fitness goals is a training journal or log. Open it up to find meticulous notes of different exercises, most likely written in a specific order, with detailed sections of sets and reps. A good training log is often filled with lists of equipment that was used and blurbs of how you were feeling on that day.
When your progress doesn’t reach a level that is satisfactory to you, it’s common to go back through your training journal to see where things went wrong. This can be helpful. Targeting different body areas will require a combination of Pilates exercises. Moreover, recovery is often given little to no consideration when planning your exercise routine, but it should be monitored in the journal.
Schedule:
While it’s great knowing the importance of regular exercise, realizing how to balance the quality of your training is even better. If you incorporate the above knowledge into your Pilates routine, it will help you manage your time and maximize the results. Pilates, just like many other fitness systems, should be done for a minimum of 3 times per week. However, to further improve your body’s strength, flexibility and endurance, you can do up to 4 or 5 Pilates classes a week. Just make sure you follow a Pilates workout schedule that suits your lifestyle, so it’s easier for you to stay consistent and enjoy your classes. We recommend sitting down and thinking about how many times you want to attend class, then working out where you can add this into your weekly schedule.
You need a day of rest at least once a week. A rest day is a day in which a person takes a break from their regular Pilates workout routine. Rest days are an important part of any exercise program. They give the body a chance to repair, recover, and help to prevent injury. During rest days, the body has a chance to remove excess lactate from the muscles. This helps to alleviate soreness. Glycogen is a form of energy stored in muscles. Exercise depletes glycogen levels, which leads to muscle fatigue. Rest days allow the muscles to replenish their glycogen stores, thereby reducing muscle fatigue and preparing the muscles for their next workout. A person should plan to have at least one rest day every 7 to 10 days.
Recovery:
When you train, you’re stressing your body and challenging its current capacity and overall homeostasis, whether it be your muscular, nervous, cardiovascular, or endocrine system. Overexercising puts repetitive stress and strain on the muscles, increasing the risk of injury. Overexercising can tire the mind as well as the body. Tiredness can lead to poor decision making during a workout routine, which increases the risk of injury.
Because you survived this challenge, you’ll adapt, and through those adaptations you’ll improve. To help us reach our goals faster, we often place such a high premium on high-intensity and high-volume exercise that we miss the boat on recovery. When your body isn’t recovering adequately between training sessions, you can easily find yourself feeling fatigued, less motivated, and injured.
Check Out The Pilates Studio at ChaiseFitness in Upper East Side in Manhattan!
At ChaiseFitness, we believe that anyone can be fit—no matter what skill level or body type. This belief inspired the creation of our patented Reinvention Method, which is for everyone—the athlete, the dancer, the beginner, the advanced, the rebuilder. We blend Pilates, ballet, and strength training and equip you with a chair and overhead bungees so that you work out all your muscles every time. We are located in the Upper East Side in Manhattan. For more information, you can contact us at (973)996-2063, or visit our website.