Recovery’s Many Faces

Training doesn’t end when you drop the bar or tap finish on Strava (unless you forgot to log it, in which case, it didn’t happen). That’s just the end of Act One.

Act Two begins the second you stop. In the middle of exercise your central nervous system is going like the clappers. Every sprint, lift and pull sends signals across your body like fleshy sheet music, instructing the conductor to keep the rhythm going. Once the final note’s played, the second half begins: recovery.

Passing responsibility from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system, like a partner fed up with nightfeeding, your heart rate slows, blood pressure calms and cortisol retreats. These three processes start the cascade towards revival – without them, nothing downstream works.

Building and Fuelling

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost… Now put the foundations under them.” – Thoreau

Microtears in your muscle fibres are the blueprint for progress. Satellite cells arrive to repair and reinforce, that’s how they rebuild stronger. And this is why everyone from your postman to your Great Aunt bang on about protein intake: without the right tools, you’ll stymie the performance you’re craving. If you haven’t locked down your daily protein target by now, take a read of Schoenfeld & Arogan for a trusted understanding.

Protein isn’t the only thing on the menu. All those burpee broadjumps have torched your glycogen (stored fuel). Once the session’s over, your body wants carbs to add more logs to the fire. Neglecting this is likely to make tomorrow a bastard.

The Ache and the Flood

DOMS is not divine punishment. It’s your body saying “we’re fixing this, maybe don’t hammer it again just yet.” There’s a reason why you rarely get bicep DOMS but your glutes are on fire for days after a session–because we use them less frequently. The pain you feel arrives by way of inflammation as macrophages remove debris and cytokines stitch muscles, tendons and ligaments back together with thicker thread. 

If it’s worth the juice, it’s worth the squeeze.

Water, Always Water

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” – Auden

Lose just 2% of your bodyweight in water and things unravel fast. Glycogen resynthesis slows, performance nosedives, and that “easy” run feels like you’re dragging concrete legs through syrup. Same goes for your brain: reaction time, memory, concentration all falter.

Hydration is boring until you don’t have it. Then it’s everything. Your muscles need to recover, and so does your mind. If you’re thirsty, you’re already late to the party.

There’s a great study debunking many myths surrounding hydration if you fancy taking a deeper dive.

Stress and Sleep: The Power Brokers

Life stress and training stress don’t run separate accounts. Remember allostasis? You bloody should. When stress doesn’t subside, muscles remain tense which increases the likelihood of injury. Too much cortisol, for too long, suppresses immune function and slows recovery times, too. 

As you’ll hopefully know, sleep is the strongest remedy we have to repair, rebalance and reset. You know most of the stuff about sleep already. What you might not have heard of is orexin: a neurochemical directly wired to our nervous system. When we sleep, we shut down our orexin systems, essentially resetting (or at least, enhancing) our stress response. This is where muscles/tissues repair, immune function rebounds and we shift from fight/flight to rest/digest.

Meanwhile, the glymphatic system is taking out the bins: flushing out metabolic waste like beta-amyloids which stack up during serious training. Half arse your sleep and you’re running tomorrow with yesterday’s garbage still in your head.

Gut Instincts

Your gut takes a beating during heavy exertion. Blood flow diverts to muscles, the intestinal lining grows leakier, and your gut microbiome wobbles. Recovery time is repair time here too. Feed it properly, and the system rebounds, stabilising immunity and nutrient absorption. The more variety your diet has, the broader your microbiome. The broader your microbiome, the “better” your immune response, digestion and recovery becomes.

Intense training temporarily suppresses immunity (especially NK cell activity), which is why athletes often get sick during heavy training blocks. Recovery is about muscles, more importantly for real-life performance, it’s also about the immune system catching back up. Sleep, carbs, and micronutrients (especially zinc, vitamin D, and polyphenols) are huge here.

Closing the Loop

Recovery isn’t the absence of training. It’s the second half of it—the part nobody Instagrams. HRV is the clearest signal we have that you’re primed to recover. It’s also the marker ZAAG makes the most notable difference to–we’ve seen improvements of up to 68% in six weeks of taking our shots. Coincidence? No, that’s kind of why we’re special.

Recovery has many faces, but one truth: it’s where the magic actually happens. Train hard, recover harder.