Many novice athletes in the pursuit of weight forget about the importance of body recovery. Learn how to deal with post-workout stress. The rate of mass gain directly depends on the severity of the training. However, this is only possible if the body is fully restored. This is what many athletes often forget and, as a result, do not see progress. It is important for many beginners to know how often muscle groups need to be trained and how long it takes for the body to recover. Today we're going to talk about extreme recovery for explosive muscle growth in bodybuilding.
Recovery types
You must remember that different systems in the body recover at different rates. This complicates the answer to the question about the rest period somewhat. With regard to bodybuilding, we are interested in the following types of recovery:
- Restoration of the energy system.
- Restoration of the hormonal system.
- Contractile recovery.
- Recovery of the central nervous system.
Now let's take a closer look at all these types of restorations.
Energy system restoration
Under the influence of physical exertion, the body is forced to expend a large amount of energy. They must be fully restored before the next lesson. Now we are talking about ATP, creatine phosphate and glycogen. If you are not in a state of overtraining and do not use dietary nutrition programs, then the body's energy resources are restored quite quickly.
Most often this happens within a few hours, but it can take a couple of days. To accelerate this type of recovery, you need to consume more carbs and creatine. Although the energy factor has a great influence on muscle growth, it is not the main one.
Restoring the hormonal system
The hormonal system under the influence of physical exertion experiences a powerful shock. After training, the catabolic background increases and the body most often needs no more than a day to restore normal functioning. Although the endocrine system is recovering over a longer period of time in comparison with the power system, this fact is not the main one in terms of restraining the overall recovery.
Another thing is if you used large amounts of work during the training, then the recovery may be delayed. In this case, a new activity two days after the last one will only complicate the whole situation. Of course, this does not apply to "chemical" athletes, who can afford more intense and high volume training during the course.
Contraction recovery
But this type of recovery is very difficult in comparison with the previous ones. If you did a medium-intensity lesson, then there should be no big problems. Research shows that recovery from this type of workout lasts 28 hours.
However, it should be borne in mind that large muscles recover over a longer period of time compared to small ones. If your workout was intense, then it will take about two days to recover. At the same time, it should be noted that all the studies that we are talking about now were carried out with the involvement of weightlifters. Since the training processes are different in bodybuilding and weightlifting, the recovery time will be different.
Bodybuilders often use negative reps, which severely damage the contractile structures of muscle tissue. Most often, they are accompanied by intracellular calcium leakage. This substance collects in tissues and the body needs additional time to eliminate it. A recent study found that after intense training of the leg muscles, recovery took more than 30 hours. When using medium-intensity classes, it took only 5 hours.
Thus, a shortened recovery may be one of the main constraints, but still not the only one.
Recovery of the central nervous system
Muscles can only contract when there is a signal from the nervous system. For this reason, we can say that the central nervous system is a factor that limits the strength capabilities of athletes. The nervous system experiences no less shock than the muscles. However, it takes much longer to recover.
So, in the course of one of the experiments, it was found that after a high-intensity exercise, the pain in the muscles disappeared within five days, and the central nervous system took about 10 days to recover. Thus, it is the restoration of the nervous system that is the most important limiting factor.
We will also say a few words about the experiments that we talked about above. Although the researchers are trying to create as close as possible to real conditions for conducting experiments, it is simply not possible to achieve one hundred percent of this. More often than not, the research involved is not a real athlete. This leads to the fact that their muscles receive significantly more damage than bodybuilders. It should also be remembered that the recovery time for each muscle group is different and largely depends on the individual characteristics of the athlete.
Learn about the role of recovery in muscle growth in this video:
