Things you should never do after running
After running there are some things that you shouldn’t do. It is obvious that all you want to do is lie down and rest, but remember that it is then that a very important moment begins: recovery.
You’ve sweated, you’ve exerted yourself, you’ve eaten, and finally, you’ve rested well: all the obvious and natural things that everyone does after a good run. You are also in a good mood even though running has made you very tired. This is the time to be on guard to ensure that the benefits of training are not lost by applying some small precautions.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
1. Recovery
Recovery is the phase immediately after training, from the physical point of view. After fatigue, your muscles need to regain tone. This is why it is necessary not to wait too long, but to accompany the recovery while the body is still warm: stopping immediately after training is like turning off the car in fifth gear.
A 5-10 minute session of foam rolling and light stretching is therefore recommended: foam rolling will stimulate circulation and blood supply to the muscles, allowing them to rebuild properly. It is important to use it on particularly tense muscles until they feel relaxed. This will have an immediate benefit, i.e., recovery will be more effective and faster.
2. Stop there? No!
Recovering doesn’t mean stopping, you know that. Avoid sitting or lying down for hours, start moving instead, but do not overdo it. The ideal would be to walk, making sure to go fairly fast. Basically, it keeps the muscles moving with low-intensity work, so they don’t contract too much.
Want some trivial advice? Walk whenever you do activities that you can do standing up, for example, making phone calls: you can’t imagine how many steps you can take when making simple business calls instead of sitting at your desk.
3. Eat
It can happen that the stomach becomes congested after a workout, and it often happens that one adapts to this feeling and does not eat anything at all. This is a mistake.
The best time to eat is during the 30 minutes after a race: during this time, your body burns what you eat better than during the rest phase. In technical terms, this is called a “metabolic window”.
In this phase your body burns better what you give it, so don’t get into trouble: just remember to eat within half an hour of the end of your workout. Don’t do it after two hours, or you risk emptying the entire refrigerator!
If you don’t feel like eating, treat yourself to something tasty that you can’t say no to: bars, chocolate, anything goes. Try to mix carbohydrates and proteins.
I want to insist once again that recovery is a fundamental part of training and does not consist of lying down in front of a movie: what I invite you to do is a dynamic recovery, performed at low intensity, keeping the engine at very low revolutions.
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