you're probably not recovering well enough. This is an absolutely essential part of getting stronger, bigger, and fitter. But nearly everyone overlooks it and they focus just on the training and maybe the nutrition. We all know that if you maxed out every day, your performance will start to drop off pretty quickly and you might end up getting injured. That's because you built up a lot of fatigue and you haven't had time to recover. And this happens to a smaller extent every time you train. The training session is a stress that causes some fatigue and stimulates some adaptations in the body. With each training session, you dig yourself into a bit of a recovery hole. And with time and sleep and food, you climb out of that hole and you return back to baseline. And this is how we can define recovery. It's the process of returning to the initial state that you were in before training or competition physically and psychologically. So, let's use an example. If you hit a one rep max of 100 kg or 225 lbs on bench one day and the next day you tried to max out again and hit the same weight, but you're unable to hit that same weight, that means you weren't well recovered enough from the previous day. There was some fatigue present from that hard attempt yesterday that prevented you from matching your previous performance. You hadn't left enough time for recovery. If you try again a few days later, you'll be better recovered and you might end up hitting the same weight again. If you surpass that 100 kilos and get 102.5 or you go from 225 to 230 lb, that means that an adaptation has likely taken place. You didn't just recover to baseline. You pushed a little bit beyond baseline and got a little bit stronger. And this is called the stress recovery adaptation cycle. You hit a training session which is stress. This creates some fatigue and stimulates certain pathways in your muscles and your nervous system to create adaptations. After a bit of time, your body recovers from that session and maybe you push a little bit beyond your previous baseline and that's called super compensation. And at that point, you're in the perfect position to train again. On the other hand, if you hit a training session, which is a big stress, and then you do it again the next day, you almost certainly hadn't recovered up to baseline yet. So, you dig yourself deeper into that recovery hole. Fatigue is too high and your performance will suffer. You'll most likely perform worse than your previous session. But if you wait long enough and you allow yourself to recover, you'll at least return to baseline and probably get an adaptation, but it will be delayed because you didn't time your training properly. If you just never allow yourself to recover by like maxing out every day and having really poor sleep, you can see how you just dig yourself deeper and deeper into this recovery hole and your performance will keep getting worse and you won't see the adaptations that you want. It's not very common for it to be this bad. The body is very resilient and it can recover pretty well. You have to push yourself very hard and not allow yourself to recover properly to end up in this position. This is classic overtraining like loads of volume, high intensity, poor sleep, really high training frequency. I would say most people are in the second camp where they don't quite recover enough to see the big adaptations that they like and they kind of stay in the same place or they just barely move the needle. What we want is to make sure this recovery process takes us up to baseline and beyond and ideally as quickly as possible so that we can train again at the peak of super compensation. get another stimulus in resulting in more adaptation. And over time, you can see how this will increase your performance. This is exactly what happens when you first start at the gym. You train, which is a pretty big stress cuz you're not used to it. You're really sore after that first session. You recover and you go back to the gym and you discover you can do a bit more weight than last time. And after the second session, you're not quite as sore as the first time because of the repeated bout effect. And you keep hitting your gym sessions. And each time you're able to do a bit more weight or more reps as your body adapts to the previous training session. That doesn't mean you're building muscle, things like improvements in coordination and neuromuscular efficiency occur before hypertrophy starts happening, but these are still adaptations taking place. Of course, this rate of improvement doesn't last forever. You definitely get diminishing returns. The fastest progress is always going to be made earlier in your lifting career, assuming that you do everything perfectly, and it slows down as time goes on. But the principles don't change throughout the journey. You need a stimulus that's big enough to drive an adaptation. Basically, that's a good workout. And you need recovery that's good enough to allow that adaptation to occur. How long it takes to recover will depend on how big the stress was, like how hard you trained, how much damage was done, and it will also depend on your ability to recover. Things like sleep, food, immune system, and so on. And just quickly, if you're finding this video helpful, sign up for my email newsletter. You'll get a free workout program that follows the principles I'm talking about in this video. Link is in the description. I'll start with the stress. The bigger the stress, the deeper the recovery hole you dig yourself into. Big stresses include training close to failure. That causes a lot of damage and it's harder to recover from than if you stayed far away from failure. That should seem obvious when I put it that way. But the thing is those reps that are close to failure are also the most stimulating for hypertrophy. So you need a big enough stress to stimulate the adaptation and that stress is going to cause some damage and create some fatigue. You just don't want to create such a massive stress that it becomes counterproductive. In this context, stopping about one or two reps away from failure is probably better than going all the way to failure every set. And pushing beyond failure causes even more damage and is much harder to recover from. So Mike Mensah style training with one set pushed way way beyond failure obviously causes insane amounts of muscle damage and fatigue which is why you need like 7 days to fully recover from it. But some guys obviously see good results from this kind of training because at least they give themselves time to recover. If you did a highintensity training workout every day, you would not see the same results. Another big stress is training a muscle at longer lengths. This causes more fatigue. So keep in mind that lengthened partials will cause more fatigue and be harder to recover from compared to full range of motion. And even full range of motion is going to be harder to recover from than shortened partials. Basically, there's a big metabolic cost to activating the muscle at long lengths. But we know it's probably best to just do full range of motion in most cases. Another big stress is long contraction durations like super slow eccentrics or very long time under tension. If you compare 6-second eccentrics to 2cond eccentrics, the six-cond one causes higher levels of blood lactate and creatine kynise, which are measures of metabolic stress and muscle damage, and those would suggest higher fatigue and bigger recovery cost. And yeah, long time under tension means you're not able to perform as many reps. There is some evidence that longer eccentrics, like 4 seconds or so, cause more muscle growth than shorter ones, but the research is pretty conflicting. My recommendation would just be to control the eccentric. Don't just let it drop. But it probably doesn't need to be longer than like three or four seconds. Depends on the exercise, but most of my eccentrics are probably like 2 or 3 seconds long. And I think this will be fine for most cases. Another big stress is very long set durations, like when you're doing high reps with light weight. And I know that probably sounds counterintuitive cuz most of us probably think that big heavy weights are more fatiguing and they're harder to recover from. uh longer sets with lighter weight actually impair recovery more than shorter sets with heavy weights. And there's lots of research to support that. Maybe psychologically the heavy weights are more kind of demanding and it feels harder. But remember the definition of recovery that we're talking about which is returning to the initial state. So I'll give you an example to put this into context. If you tested your one rep max on Monday and after that you did three sets of five to failure which would require quite heavy weights or three sets of 30 to failure which obviously would require lighter weights. It takes longer for you to match that previous one rep max performance after doing the sets of 30 to failure because those long sets with high reps and uh light weight, those sets are more fatiguing which again seems counterintuitive but that is what the research suggests. and you will probably notice that you get much more sore after a set of 30 to failure than a set of five to failure. Another big stress is doing new exercises or new ranges of motion that you're not used to. I'll give you a personal example. I usually do seated leg curls, but one time the machine was taken and I had to do lying leg curls and my hamstrings were very sore the day after cuz I was training that muscle from a new angle, a new position. But if I did those exercises regularly, they wouldn't get so damaged or sore because my body would get used to them pretty quickly. And for all of these stresses I've talked about, they're all exacerbated with higher volumes. Like more sets per workout and per week creates a bigger stress obviously because you're just doing more work. That's more for your body to recover from. So controlling your volume is one of the main ways to control how much stress and fatigue you're putting onto your body. The takeaway is you need a big stress to stimulate adaptations like hypertrophy or strength gains or speed gains, but not so big that it causes too much fatigue and hinders your ability to recover normally and adapt. There's an ideal window between not training hard enough and training too hard. So, let's think about these variables on a spectrum, assuming pretty much all else is equal, except the one variable that we're talking about. Does higher or lower volume cause a bigger stress, more fatigue, and take longer to recover from? It's higher volume. If you take a heavy load to failure or a light load to failure, which one causes more fatigue? Like I said, perhaps counterintuitively, it's actually light loads. Probably because you have to do more reps and the set is much longer and you just get more like metabolite buildup and more calcium ion accumulation and those kind of things. Longer set duration or shorter set duration, which is more damaging and fatiguing. It's the longer one. Slow or fast contraction velocity. It's slow. Lengthened or shortened bias lifts. lengthened, close to failure or far from failure. Obviously, close to failure is going to be more damaging and take longer to recover from. New exercises or familiar exercises, the new ones, and a couple more, long rest periods or short rest periods. Short ones are obviously going to lead to more fatigue and be harder to recover from. And high frequency training or low frequency training. High frequency obviously means you have less time to recover. So, all else equal, that will be harder to recover from. Keep these variables in mind when you're thinking about recovery. these uh stresses, the size of your stress. So basically the stuff I've just mentioned is properly managing your programming. It's the stuff you do in your training. And the other half of this equation is how well you're able to recover from those training sessions. So let's think about what could affect this. First is your training experience. And this might be surprising, but beyond the first couple of sessions, beginners actually recover faster than more advanced trainees because they're experiencing less absolute stress and damage. More advanced lifters are able to lift heavier. They can recruit higher threshold motor units and push themselves much further. So, they can cause more damage to themselves and require more focus on recovery. Let me give you an example. Who do you think is going to recover faster? A beginner doing 20 reps of squats with their max of 40 kilos or an advanced athlete doing 20 reps of squats with their max of 140 kilos. Obviously, the beginner is experiencing less total stress and will recover a bit faster and the other guy might struggle to walk for a week. Another factor is your cardiovascular fitness. If you have a pretty good cardiovascular system, you'll be able to remove metabolites quicker. You can improve blood flow and nutrient delivery, and you'll have better recovery in between sets and in between sessions. So, that's a pretty good reason to train conditioning. Another interesting factor is your muscle fiber types. Fast twitch fibers generate more force and they're much more fatiguable, so they take longer to recover. And slow twitch fibers generate less force and they're built for repeated low inensity contractions. They're really fatigued resistant. I have some videos about fiber types if you're interested in that. I'll put an image on screen of most of the major muscles and their average fiber type percentages. So, you may want to consider fiber type in how long you give each muscle to recover. So, basically, your training frequency for that muscle. Fast twitch muscles like the triceps and the rectus forous will probably need a little bit longer to recover. And then slow twitch muscles like the solius and the biceps foras can be trained slightly more often. I think in practice this is probably over complicating things a bit. If you just train each muscle two or three times a week or every two or three days that'll be fine for most of them. If you're someone who's very slow twitch dominant as in you have a higher overall proportion of slow twitch fibers then you can probably recover a little bit faster than someone who's very fast twitch dominant. Most people are about an even mix of the two. And on a similar note, smaller muscles are generally easier to contract very hard. They have higher levels of voluntary activation compared to big muscles. And this leads to more muscle damage. So smaller muscles tend to recover more slowly. Again, in practice, it's probably over complicating things in my opinion. And just training a muscle two or three times a week will be fine. Your hormonal environment is another thing that can have an impact on your recovery. If you have higher testosterone, higher growth hormone and lots of IGF-1, you're going to recover better. Those are probably the most important hormones for recovery. If you have chronically high cortisol or low testosterone, you'll recover more slowly and your muscles are going to break down more. If these are things that you're interested in optimizing, I have a testosterone optimization guide where I give the best strategies for optimizing testosterone, cortisol, and other hormones like estrogen, prolactin, and so on. I'll have the link below. Perhaps the most obvious factor in recovery is your sleep. Obviously, this is essential. Most of the recovery and the repair processes happen during sleep, especially deep slowwave sleep. Good luck recovering properly if you're getting like 4 hours of sleep a night. You have to make sleep a priority in your life if you're serious about improving your performance and building muscle. Don't just dismiss it as a waste of time. I've talked about how to improve your sleep a million times before, but the basics are wake up and go to bed at the same time every day, including weekends. Sleep about 7 to n hours per night. Watch the sunrise and the sunset and go outside a few times during the day. Don't use bright or blue lights after sunset. Dim the lights and use blue light blockers instead. Don't eat a big meal or exercise within two or three hours of bed. Generally, just chill before bed, like lower stress. De stimulate. Get ready for sleep. And in your bedroom, it should be cold, dark, and silent for the best sleep quality. Another thing that will affect your recovery is stress. If you're constantly in fight orflight mode, that can delay your recovery. If cortisol is chronically elevated, that can oppose testosterone, promote muscle breakdown, and cause sleep problems. and suppress the immune system and all of that is bad for recovery. So, your stress needs to be managed effectively. You want to be in a pretty good mental state, not stressed all the time. Another one of the most important factors is diet. If you're not getting enough calories or protein, you're going to really struggle to recover and make progress. After exercise, your glycogen stores get depleted, so you need to refill them with some carbs. Uh carbs mostly timed around your workout. So, some before the workout, if it's a really long one, you can have carbs within the workout and definitely afterwards as well. combined with protein afterwards. Stay hydrated before, during, and after the workout and all day. Don't drink a load of alcohol. And there are some specific foods that seem to help with recovery from exercise. An interesting one is tart cherry juice. I actually did some research on this at my university. My research group was looking into bioactive compounds in plants like blueberries, elderberries, some herbs, and tart cherry juice. And I was investigating the mechanism of how tart cherry improves recovery and performance. And we suspected it was the antioxidant properties. kind of unsurprisingly. Another one is omega-3s from things like fatty fish. Pineapple. This has an enzyme called bromelain which seems to help with recovery. Watermelon contains an amino acid called lcitrine which seems to help with recovery. And dark chocolate as well, probably the polyphenols. And just to touch on supplements, uh creatine absolutely helps. Magnesium can help with relaxation and sleep and recovery. And some adaptogens like ashraandha or rodeiola can lower cortisol if it's high. Otherwise, you really don't need to use these. And I want to say that again. If you're not super stressed out with high cortisol, taking these adaptogens can drop your cortisol dangerously low. And I've heard stories of guys with permanent anhidonia and emotional flatlining because they took Ashwagandha and then like 5 years later they still hadn't recovered. So I'm not quick to recommend Ashwagandha or anything else that really messes with cortisol quite powerfully. Something else that will help with recovery is good blood flow. You want nutrients and oxygen to be delivered to the muscles, the damaged tissues. And you want metabolic waste products to be removed. And all of that is helped by good blood flow. So light movement is great. Things like walking, yoga, hiking, that kind of thing. You should be getting some movement in every day. And we call that active recovery. Compression gear also helps with blood flow. Massage as well. A massage helps in other ways like reducing muscle tightness and soreness. You probably know that most top athletes will have like massage therapists as part of the team to help them with their recovery. Improving your cardio will enhance blood flow and there are some foods that help blood flow as well. Fatty fish like salmon and sidines are good for the blood vessel health. Beetroots are high in nitrates which are the precursor to nitric oxide which is a molecule that widens the blood vessels allowing for more blood to flow through them. Citrus fruits, garlic, and leafy greens will also help blood flow as well. Heat and cold exposure is an interesting method of improving recovery. You're probably aware that cold exposure has been traditionally used to help recovery, like putting ice on an injured joint or doing ice baths. Those are quite popular recently. And cold definitely makes you feel subjectively more recovered and it's very useful if you absolutely have to perform like you're in the middle of a competition and you just need to feel ready to perform. But cold might actually impair the molecular processes that should be going on to repair the muscle and create the adaptations that we want. For example, cold water immersion can attenuate the anabolic signaling pathways that are important for hypertrophy. So, I know that, you know, ice baths and cold showers looks cool and it feels badass, but in terms of hypertrophy, it might actually be holding you back. Heat exposure is probably more beneficial for producing the physiological adaptations we want, while cold exposure is good for short-term relief and subjective recovery. HSP70 is a protein that facilitates muscle regeneration and recovery. And this heat shock protein can be induced by heat exposure like sauna. Heat stress can actually stimulate mTor and other hypertrophy related signaling pathways. Heat enhances blood flow by causing widening of the blood vessels. And that's good, like I mentioned earlier, for nutrient and oxygen delivery and removing waste products. And heat therapy can reduce muscle soreness. So potentially similar subjective benefits to cold exposure in that regard. Moving on from that, your daily activity is going to affect your recovery ability. If you work in construction, for example, very physical job, you're probably going to have a harder time recovering from a tough training session compared to someone in a less active job. Obviously, working a physical job will make you fitter, so you're kind of more able to handle more physical work, but at the same time, it does take its toll on your body. Obviously, I'm not going to tell you to change your job, but if you have a very physical job, you'll have to focus on other areas of recovery, like making sure you're eating enough calories and protein, getting really good sleep, lowering stress, and maybe things like sauna and massage. The immune system is essential in recovery. Inflammation is a crucial part of the repair and recovery process. It allows immune cells to get into the damaged tissues and remove the waste and start setting off the healing and repair processes. Like I mentioned with cold exposure, you actually don't want to reduce the short-term inflammation that you get like after exercise with anti-inflammatory drugs or cold exposure. Inflammation is a necessary part of the healing process. It's just bad when it's chronic and out of control. And the most common ways that happens is when you have a bad diet, you don't exercise. You smoke or drink a lot. you're obese, very stressed, and you have poor sleep. So, if you take care of those things, your inflammation, your immune system is probably going to be pretty good. So, that was a load of information. And just to summarize those, my basic advice for enhancing your recovery, have a good cardiovascular system by doing some conditioning training. Get good sleep, have a good hormonal environment like testosterone, growth hormone, IGF-1. Lower stress, have a healthy diet, ensure you have good blood flow, move daily, like some active recovery every day, some walking, sauna, and massage can be good things to add in, and you're on a solid immune system. All of those are the most important things to remember. If you take nothing else from this video, remember these things for enhancing your recovery. They'll probably get you at least 80% of your results along with a properly managed training program. And there are some more obscure things that people use to enhance their recovery, stuff that's not quite so well researched, but arguably more interesting and exciting than the core stuff. And these are probably the hacks that many of you are here to learn about. If you've got the basics locked in and you want to go even further, then you might want to try some of these strategies out. And I'd also like to hear in the comments if you have any recovery methods that you personally swear by. Let me know below. Red light therapy is the first one, also known as photobiomodulation. This uses near infrared and red wavelengths of light which penetrate the skin and are absorbed by the mitochondria and this is meant to increase ATP production, reduce oxidative stress and stimulate growth factors. There are some studies on this showing that it can slightly decrease the strength loss that you get uh shortly after a workout can potentially reduce muscle soreness and it can reduce inflammation. You can get really fancy red light therapy systems or the budget version is just to use one of these little infrared lamps. And a lot of the biohacking guys on Twitter really swear by red light therapy. Cupping is another one. This is where you place cups on the skin to create suction. It's meant to promote blood flow and reduce muscle tension. I've seen the Chinese Olympic weightlifting team using it and some swimmers as well. So maybe there's something to it if these top level athletes are using it. The next one is grounding or earthing. This involves direct skin contact with the earth which eliminates the electrical potential between you and the earth. There are studies showing that this reduces inflammation, enhances blood flow, but some of these studies have some questionable conflicts of interest. Needs to be much more research done on this cuz I think it is an interesting topic. Personally, I like the way that being barefoot on the grass makes me feel. It's very calming somehow. I'm not sure I would recommend a grounding mat though. I think you should just be barefoot outside on the natural materials. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is another one. This is where you're breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized environment which allows the lungs to gather much more oxygen than is normally possible. LeBron James is one famous athlete who does this. It's supposed to speed up healing from injuries, reduce inflammation and pain, and improve aerobic metabolism. And there is mixed evidence on its ability to improve recovery. Palm cooling. I remember hearing about this from Huberman like 4 years ago. This is where you cool your palms uh in between sets during a workout. So, not really a long-term recovery thing, just to kind of increase short-term recovery. The palms of your hands and I believe the soles of your feet have arteriovenenous anastmoses which are basically direct connections between the arteries and veins. And usually the blood has to go through capillaries in order to pass from the arteries to the veins. And these parts of the vascular system release a lot more heat than anywhere else in the body. And if you cool them down, that means that the cool blood returns to the heart and lowers the core body temperature. That's the theory. There's mixed evidence of whether it actually works. I think the difference in performance and recovery that you get from using this is probably pretty minor, but I guess there's not much better to do in between sets, so you can try it out if you want. You definitely don't want to be overheating. Next is bathing with magnesium salts. This definitely relaxes the muscles and can reduce soreness, and it really helps you to relax and sleep. And baths are a way of getting heat exposure, which I talked about earlier. That's pretty good for recovery, enhanced blood flow, heat shock proteins. If you're someone who takes baths quite a lot, then you might as well add in some magnesium salts, like Epsom salts or magnesium chloride flakes. Maybe light a few candles. Lovely stuff. Good thing to do before bed. Torine is an amino acid that can potentially reduce muscle damage and soreness, reduce inflammation and enhance glycogen repletion after a workout. And a lot of people really like this as a supplement. It does a lot of things, a lot of benefits in the body. And lastly, some peptides. BPC157 is kind of the king of recovery and healing peptides. It's nicknamed the Wolverine peptide because it's so good for healing. It's isolated from human gastric juice and it works by several potential mechanisms, not really fully understood yet. It can enhance the repair of muscle injuries. Seems to be especially good for tendon healing and growth. It's also used by lots of people to repair the gut barrier and some people report hair growth when they're using it, like hair on your head, facial hair, body hair, all kinds. And there's a reason that athletes in competitions are banned from using BPC157 because it's pretty powerful. And the other one is MK677 or ibutamorin. And this is a peptide that stimulates the release of growth hormone. And if you watch my recent video, you know that growth hormone and downstream of that IGF-1 are very important for recovery and healing. So it basically has similar effects to growth hormone and IGF-1, especially enhancing your sleep and repairing tissues. It'll also make you extremely hungry because it works by binding to the ghrein receptor and ghrein is the hunger hormone. So, it's a good one if you need to bulk and you don't have much of an appetite. If you take this, you'll be eating everything in sight. There can be some very unpleasant side effects though, like increased anxiety and fear, numbness, muscle pain, increased prolactin, which can cause gyno in some people, short-term insulin resistance, and swelling. So, I'm not going to recommend using either of these peptides, but just want to inform you of them. That's everything I've got for today. Let's do a mega summary of everything I've talked about in this video. You need to get the right balance between stimulus and fatigue. So, don't go crazy with the length and partials. Stay a little bit away from failure. Don't push like all the way to failure and beyond every time. Don't do super high volume. Don't do super high rep sets. Like 5 to 15 reps will be perfect. And use fairly long rest periods. Now, to enhance your ability to recover, sleep well, obviously. Train your cardiovascular system. Have a good hormonal balance. Lower stress. Very importantly, eat enough calories and protein and all your micronutrients. Supplement creatine, move daily, uh so active recovery, walking, some light exercise, and consider using the sauna and getting some massages. And potentially try out red light therapy, grounding, and magnesium baths. Those are my recommendations. Thank you for watching. If you want more like this, subscribe to my channel and sign up to my free newsletter where I send super valuable emails about subjects like this every week. Link is in the description. and I'll see you in the next