How to improve your SLEEP and RECOVERY after sport?

This question is not going to be a question I was asked, but rather a response to one of the emails I received.

I will take the opportunity of this FAQ #17 to respond to these messages that I receive, which are not really questions but are simply people sharing their life experience,

“Hello my dear Slim, I am responding to your article on recovery, very interesting as usual,

The problem I've always had, even with low-intensity workouts for my modest level, is that I get sore the day after tomorrow and not the day after that.

So it's difficult to train every other day, even though it's classic in bodybuilding programs, even if it's not for the same muscles.

Now another very annoying problem for me is being able to sleep when training ends at 10 p.m., it often ends in an almost sleepless night and I was wondering after listening to the podcast with your stuntman friend,

If the massage gun could be a solution to these two problems, in any case a complete article on recovery would interest me a lot,

Best regards, Bruno.”

Bruno, a very, very good question and several possible openings.

How to stop having muscle aches?

So the first thing I'd like to address before giving you my answer about massage guns, the famous Theragun, is your aches and pains.

When you tell me that your problem is that you always have muscle aches the day after tomorrow, then...

This is going to be very, very simple to explain and I hope to bring some clarity to anyone who still feels sore the next day, the day after, or a few days after your workout.

You can also refer to my friend Pierre Dufraisse's conference for the summit of movement and holistic health in which he talks about Antifragility.

He also talks about the cycle of intense experience followed by an adapted rest period which allows a positive adaptation to hormetic stress , even if he doesn't like this word, I know it but I tease him a little with that,

Which would bring us an upward adaptation and therefore an improvement in your case and in the case of all those who have aches and pains, I tell you once and for all, I hope:

By definition, when you have muscle aches, it's because you've passed through this intense zone.

Even though it looks like a bodybuilding workout where you do a classic four times 10 and take 2 to 3 minutes of rest between each set,

You tell yourself it's not visually intense, you're not doing burpees, and your heart rate isn't increasing.

But if the next day you have muscle aches, it's proof that it's intense for your body!

You have already passed into an intensity zone .

Intensity does not necessarily mean speed of execution, acceleration, explosiveness.

If for example you're doing something very slow like strength training and you say to yourself I'm going to lift the heaviest bar I can lift, maybe not as many times as possible, but even if you do something like let's say 2 or 3 rep max and 3 minutes rest.

If the moment you do it is good for your body, it remains a bit too much of an overload compared to the progression it had followed until then.

The next day, you will have repercussions, such as aches and pains, fatigue, etc.

What does that mean?

This means that your body is telling you that this test you did, that is to say this training method with this load to lift, it felt it as something excessive compared to its state of equilibrium .

And so he suggests that you observe your aches and pains so that you can give him rest and he can repair himself in order to return to a state of balance ,

And potentially, if the stress hasn't been too intense for you and you have sufficient rest time, you can experience the beneficial effects of upward adaptation.

So even if you look at yourself and think it doesn't look very intense, you could be wrong.

There is a state, let's say a fairly fine, fairly nuanced and magnificent zone in which you can train every day and never have muscle aches .

To reach this state it is very simple, we do tests and we try to note our feelings .

It can be done over years, over decades, it doesn't matter, but it's specific to each person.

If you train at one point and the next day you don't have any muscle soreness, it's because the training you just did wasn't necessarily the most useful, because you probably didn't do anything.

You procrastinated, it was too easy, so it's up to you to increase the difficulty.

And if you don't know how to measure yourself well yet, well you start from the bottom, you start with something easy, you observe yourself the next day.

Do I feel bad? More tired?

Do I have any aches and pains?

Did I have a difficult night's sleep?

And then you increase the intensity until you get to something interesting.

For example, after doing a certain type of training, you have muscle aches for two days, this means that this type of training was too intense, you will have to reduce the load, volume, intensity, and other parameters .

You're going to reduce a parameter and play with it to try to achieve that ultimate workout which can be explained like this:

I'm still challenging myself, but without going into the red zone .

You want to be on the border, and sometimes cross over, slightly to the other side, into the red zone, while giving yourself enough rest to be able to adapt.

If for example you have a lifestyle in which all other parameters are fairly stable,

The pace of work, the stress level, the family rhythm, you have a good recovery, you always sleep at roughly the same times, etc.

You can afford to vary your training.

Typically, this is my personal case, training is one of the variables on which I can play almost as much as I want because the other parameters of my health, diet, sleep, etc., are rather fixed and rather regular.

If, for example, I say to myself, today I want to set a price for training, I set myself a huge amount of work, I really go for it full speed.

Sleep will always be set at the same time and I know the quality of my sleep.

I'll see the next day if it hasn't exhausted me, if I don't have any aches and pains, it means I can train like that .

But on the other hand, the day when I want to train like that, but there is a parameter that will disrupt my daily life, for example I have to take a train, or before this training I had stress with my family, with my friends.

I know I'm going to have to tone it down that day.

So these are always games that you have to have fun with and you have to constantly go back and forth between what I think is intense and the physical reality that I observe , that is to say the aches and pains, the headaches, the fatigue, the drop in energy...

And the parameters that I changed, if for example you change the intensity of your training and at the same time you change the diet, and at the same time you change the sleep,

You will never be able to analyze yourself properly and know which parameter had the greatest impact, or which parameter helped you, or which caused you this fatigue, these aches, etc.

So when you see bodybuilding programs, for example, that tell you to alternate muscle groups every other day to avoid fatigue, it's implied...

Even if no one explains it and no one says it, because maybe they don't know it or maybe they know it but they think it's not important to share it, when it is, it's super important.

This kind of thinking implies that everything else in your life is taken care of .

That you have the same level of stress.

That you have the same emotional level.

But that's not the case.

I can give you a program where you're going to train every three days and you're still going to have muscle soreness, because maybe the rest of your parameters aren't right.

As you mentioned Bruno, just after in the email, if your sleep is completely ruined, no matter what you do in training, the next day you're going to be knackered, you're going to be tired.

Because you know, it is in the sleep phase that we have recovery and upward adaptation .

The day after tomorrow the problem is not the practice, the problem is always the practitioner, it is up to you to see what you impose on yourself and it is up to you to reduce that and to make this humble reasoning, while managing to remove your ego.

Becoming able to tell yourself that what you thought wasn't too intense is actually too intense, so it's up to you to lower your standard.

You thought you were at this level and in fact you are at a lower level.

And the clearer and more transparent you are with that, the more you will push yourself upwards, because you will know what your starting line is, what your baseline is and from that base you will be able to increase very slowly .

This is the famous Kaisen method!

1% improvement every day towards your goals, whether it's strength gain, hypertrophy, whatever.

When to use your massage gun?

For me this would be the best way to approach the physical part, and once again I insist because it is the most important, look at the other parameters and in particular sleep!

Without good restorative sleep you will not function , nothing will work.

Bruno, when you were talking about this difficulty sleeping, if you already train in the evening and the training ends at 10 p.m., there is no magic formula...

So forget your Theragun, the famous massage gun, it will never help you get a good night's sleep if you finish your physical practice at 10 p.m., it doesn't exist, okay.

You can't expect a massage gun to solve your problem.

How to fall asleep faster?

Let me explain this to you: if you train in the evening, you are asking your body to exert a physical effort that is outside of what the body expects.

Sunset should correspond to a return to calm , cortisol drops, the body begins to prepare the hormones for sleep, and then we want to have an environment in which we can cool down.

We no longer want to be exposed to light so that our eyes do not think that it is still daytime, in short your body is organized so that hormonally and physiologically it slowly turns off, as the sun sets.

So typically exposure to light after sunset, computers, cell phones, are a big problem, it tells your eyes that there is still light and so it will reactivate cortisol and all the hormones to get you moving again.

And it's the same effect with training, that is to say that if you train after 8 p.m., the sun has already set and I understand that in our modern world this is not easy.

Because classes, for example art classes, are often in the evening because people work until 7 p.m.

When you do this, what you're asking your body to do is reactivate itself when all it wants to do is rest.

When I tell you this, you may not feel it, you tell yourself that in the evening you have plenty of energy, but that's because you've already adapted to this modern lifestyle ,

What I'm talking about is traditional classical human physiology in an environment adapted for the human animal.

And I understand that we no longer have this environment,

But that's why people who will always find fault when someone tells them that physiology tells us that at sunset the body produces all the hormones for a relaxation of the body for a state of calm,

And that all we can do in an evening routine is to promote this return to calm.

People who tell you:

“No, when I finish work I have lots of energy.”

It's that in fact they are not looking at the problem in the right order, they are looking at their state today, this state which is the consequence of an adaptation which will be precisely against the implied natural state in the physiologically defined sense.

And so they will think of themselves as counter-examples, proof that they are not governed by this model.

But no !

It's because during your working day you drank 4 coffees and in the end you're really annoyed because you're doing activities in the evening that the human animal shouldn't do, or in any case we shouldn't have this intensity at those times.

Training will excite us, it's normal that you're full of energy after your late workout, you've asked your body to reactivate itself, to use its muscles, to increase its temperature when it basically wants to decrease its temperature,

He wants to rest, to calm down

So at 10 p.m. when you get out of training, you won't be able to calm down anyway, it will take longer to calm down and so you will go to bed around two in the morning.

You can do all the massages, use all the massage guns, and do all the meditations you want, but it won't work.

The thing to remove or the thing to modify , and which will have the most impact on your sleep, so that it is more qualitative, is to shift your training .

And if you can't, which I understand, I was a professional boxer and all the training was from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., well that's life, too bad you have to accept that you can't do that.

And so you're going to try to reduce the damage.

For example, if you don't work on weekends, you'll already try to get as much sleep as possible, or rebalance yourself as much as possible, and conversely, perhaps take advantage of naps during the day.

In the morning, you can organize a routine that will allow you to start the day well, with good exposure to the sun, a little movement, and you try to adjust as best you can.

What I'm talking about is optimal health, but most of us are already in a permanently degraded state.

And then there's the effect of life, that is, there are people who will pay attention to all these moments, they will try to be connected to the circadian cycle, etc.

But in any case there are accidents, there are children, there is work, there are lots of things that will happen and that will require us to constantly adapt and have a little flexibility in our approach to managing our time, I agree.

But if you feel that your sleep is disrupted anyway because your training is late and that it is starting to cause you problems because it will cause you problems in terms of recovery,

And recovery will mean that you will increase the risk of injury afterwards, your mood will change, weight gain will occur, because you don't even have these hormonal rebalancings , I'm thinking in particular of ghrelin and insulin.

So there is damage, or at least there are cascading effects absolutely everywhere!

Digestive system;

Endocrine system;

Parasympathetic and sympathetic systems;

We can even think about positive thinking.

So sleep, the moment when we recover, is absolutely crucial, personally I will make sure to find other ways to train.

How to find your circadian rhythm?

If your training involves practices like martial arts, you have less choice, because it's about acquiring skills.

But if it's muscle-building and physical preparation, find another time to train, you know, even if it's just at noon before your lunch break, or find other ways to train, perhaps more minimalist.

Like three 20-minute sessions a day, rather than one big two-hour session in the evening.

So that's it for the recommendations, and no the massage gun has no effect on improving sleep.

No, if you train in the evening, you train in the evening you will be excited, and the massage gun the only interest that could have, is precisely in this immediate well-being aspect.

But other than that, if you want to invest 400 euros in a massage gun, do it, but don't expect it to have any results in improving the quality of your sleep.

Improving the quality of your sleep can be done very simply, starting with changing the times you sleep , creating a pre-sleep routine, you know, in which you will already avoid the lights from screens perhaps an hour and a half before.

For digestion in particular, avoid eating one hour before going to sleep .

These are elements that will have a much greater impact on the quality of your sleep.

Sleep needs to be restorative rather than having a massage gun.

If you eat Snickers, play PS4 or watch Netflix, you can do 5 hours of massage gun, sleep at 2 a.m., it's still not going to work.

There you go, I hope this will help you, I hope this will help a lot of people who have questions about sleep,

And if you ever have any other questions about sleep, I'm preparing episodes. I told you about it some time ago. I'm preparing exclusive episodes that I called the Mouvers Lab !

In which I will be able to express myself alone, a bit like in his FAQs, I will try to speak in detail about all these aspects of holistic health, physical practice, recovery, sleep, diet, etc.

Thank you for your attention, my Mouver!

Nomad Slim
Founder of MOUVERS