Hi everyone, and welcome to week seven. The training doesn't make you stronger. The recovery afterwards does, and that's where Ingrid and I have spent a lot of our attention over the past eight months. This week I'll take you through four things we use after hard sessions, what the research says about each, and which ones I'd put money on versus which ones I'm still testing on myself. Luna makes an appearance.
Watch time = 5 minutes.
These videos were filmed over the summer, so the countdowns you hear won't match today's date.
What We Do After the Workout
Once you're done the workout, the real training starts. The session is the stimulus. The adaptation happens afterwards, while you sleep and eat and sit still, and it only happens if you give your body the rest it needs.
Here are four things Ingrid and I use, with what the evidence actually says about each one.
Sauna. A post-exercise sauna, done consistently, expands your plasma (a part of your blood) volume. The study people cite is Scoon and colleagues at Otago: six male distance runners, three weeks, about thirty minutes at ninety degrees after each session. Plasma volume rose 7.1% and time to exhaustion improved 32%.
Two things about that 32%. It was time to exhaustion, which is a sensitive measure that exaggerates changes, and the authors themselves translated it to roughly 1.9% in an actual time trial. And six runners is a small study. Later work by Kirby and colleagues found similar heat-acclimation adaptations across a larger group including women, so the finding has held up.
The mechanism is likely heat acclimation. When you heat yourself after training, your body responds by holding more fluid in your bloodstream, which gives you more circulating volume to move oxygen with and to lose to sweat before you get into trouble. We will definitely be seating in Cartagena!
Cold water immersion. We use a cold tub most mornings at around eight to ten degrees.
The clearest effect is on soreness. Cold water immersion after hard exercise reduces delayed onset muscle soreness the following day, which we saw in our own work at the University of Toronto. Whether it raises or lowers inflammation is unsettled, and the answer probably depends on water temperature and duration. There's some evidence that repeated cold exposure modulates the stress response over time, with men and women responding differently, and that literature is thin enough that I'd call it a reasonable hypothesis rather than a finding.
One thing I want to be specific about, because it changes when you should do this practice. Cold water immersion straight after resistance training blunts the muscle-building signal, and studies following people over weeks have found smaller strength and size gains in the groups that took cold plunges after lifting. That's why ours happen in the morning, away from strength work. If you're lifting to get stronger, keep the cold well clear of the session.
Red light. The research here is equivocal and I'd say so before recommending it to anyone. The proposed mechanism is that red and near-infrared light is absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase, an enzyme in your mitochondrial electron transport chain, which may improve energy production in the tissue being lit. Red light doesn't penetrate deeply, so whatever it does is limited to skin and structures close to the surface. Nothing is reaching your organs.
The better-supported use is superficial pain relief, which is what we use it for after hard sessions. Ingrid has been using it on the nerve areas she's still working to heal and she reports it helping. That's two people's experience, and I offer it as exactly that. Test it on yourself.
Journaling. The research on expressive writing goes back decades and the effects on mood and stress are modest but real. I do it differently than most people suggest. Instead of writing about what's going badly, I write about what's going well, which I picked up from Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights. When you're struggling, you can go back and read your own account of a period when you were doing fine. That record is more useful than trying to remember.
These practices are of course optional. If any one of them doesn't suit you, drop it without worry!
Your 1% this week: pick one recovery practice and put it in your calendar as an appointment, the way you would a meeting. Make it an if-then: when I finish my Wednesday workout, I get in the sauna for fifteen minutes. The practice matters less than the scheduling, because recovery is the thing that gets skipped when the week gets busy.
Disclosure: Coldture provided our cold tub in support of our Great World Race preparation.
