18 Tips For Recovery - From Exercise Or Injury

Whether you're an elite athlete trying to gain an edge and recover from your workouts faster, or just someone who constantly suffers from back pain, joint pain, or muscle pain, then these tips will probably help you!

There's certain things we can do that will help the body in preventing injury, speed up injury recovery, and also improve the body's ability to handle exercise with less "side effects" the next day.

Without further ado, in no particular order, here's 18 tips you can start using today to improve your exercise capabilities and decrease your chances of injury or pain. They contain a mixture of things you can do yourself as well as options that require specialist healthcare assistance:

1. Chiropractic - I might be biased, but in my opinion this is the most important piece of exercise performance and injury prevention/recovery. Our brain and nervous system controls every cell in our body, so if there's any interference there, then we simply cannot perform anywhere near our best. Chiropractic addresses the nervous system interference!
2. Acupuncture - Acupuncture has been shown to reduce muscle pain, muscle fatigue, and over-training fatigue by targeting our energy centers.
3. Stem Cell Therapy - This just might be one of those magic pieces of injury recovery, especially if you have joints that are starting to become arthritic but aren't too advanced yet. It's my belief that if you catch the arthritic process in time, you can probably avoid a joint replacement later in life simply due to stem cell therapy.
4. Cryotherapy - Whether it's icing an injury, or taking a cold shower after exercise, or using a cryotherapy tank, cold therapy is useful for a large array of injuries and soreness.
5. Deloading - This concept simply means utilizing a lighter week of exercise every 4-8 weeks to give your body a chance to recover.
6. Vibration Therapy - Vibration therapy is great for improving lymphatic flow, and our lymphatics are our body's way of removing all sorts of toxic build-up, including lactic acid.
7. Compression stockings/socks - These are great for helping long distance athletes remove the lactic acid and other swelling that can occur from pounding the pavement on long mileage runs.
8. Magnets - There's actually a surprising amount of research showing that magnets can help with wound healing, including muscle injury.
9. Kinesiotape - This is another trick to help improve lymphatic flow, and can be used for both a fresh injury or a chronic injury.
10. Foam Roller - These are a must for all athletes, and anyone who sits all day... So basically everybody should own at least one foam roller. We have a couple of videos on our YouTube channel showing how to roll the spine and hips.
11. Infrared Sauna - These work by increasing your core body temperature in a very similar way to how your body creates a fever. This increase causes and increase in heat shock proteins and white blood cells, so it improves both your immune system and blood flow - which is obviously very important for muscle growth and repair.
12. Inversion - While I don't love inversion tables for everyone, they are fantastic in my opinion for someone who is older (above 55-60), has a very stiff lower back, and deals with chronic low back pain. Those of us who are younger with low back pain, lying on your back in the 90/90 position with your feet against the wall or on a chair can be very effective at getting pressure off the lower back.
13. Fasting - This creates autophagy (where our body eats up damaged cells including muscle cells to use for energy) and stem cell growth. This might be one of the easiest and most powerful strategies you can use for better performance and overall health.
14. Anti-Inflammatory Diet - Eating less inflammatory foods and more anti-inflammatory foods can help with just about every health condition we face, not just sporting performance. Try to eat more organic berries, ginger, pineapple, dark greens, avocados, and apple cider vinegar, just to name a few!
15. Vitamin C - Not only is this a very powerful anti-oxidant, a Russian study has also shown that if you supplement before and after surgery then you're likely to be released 1-2 days earlier than those who don't! As a side note, anyone dealing with cancer or a low immune system should look into intravenous vitamin C therapy asap!
16. Omega 3 Fatty Acids - These are also very anti-inflammatory. Try to get as much as you can from your diet and then supplement as needed
17. Turmeric/Curcumin - There is an amazing amount of research showing how powerful Turmeric (or more important the curcumin in the turmeric) is as an anti-inflammatory. In fact in the far majority of research, supplementing with turmeric (because it's hard to get enough curcumin just from eating it) beats anti-inflammatory medications hands down!
18. Magnesium - If you're deficient in magnesium you'll most likely experience muscle cramps, muscle soreness, decreased muscle force, and a decrease in quality sleep. All of those things leads to poor performance and a higher likelihood of injuries.

So there you have it. Obviously this list isn't exhaustive, but I felt that all 18 of these things can be easily utilized by just about anyone. And don't feel you need to do them all, just choose the ones that you think would work best for you in your current situation, whatever that may be!