Intense workout is essential from a beginner fitness enthusiast to professional athlete in order to maximise their full potential either to lose weight, increase performance or maximise strength.
There are many types of intense workout to max out results and prevent injury. The common ones are heavy cardio exercise, functional training, high intensity interval training (HIIT) or weight training. It is not uncommon for people to experience slow recovery rate, extreme muscle soreness, and fatique. Sometimes if the body cannot adapt with the training, it will cause mild fever, flu or even nausea.
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Besides resting and good nurtition for optimum recovery, the revolution of modern sports science suggests that there are also exercise that can speed up recovery. When I first heard about recovery exercise, I was quite skeptical because since the body had too much stress, how can I continue to have a recovery workout?
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So, recovery exercise is actually a low impact exercise which include a lot of stretches and body balancing like yoga, pilates, or simply recovery workout. For long distance runners, they will run a slow jog with minimum intensity just to relax the lower body muscles.
Due to my age is categorized Masters Runner (30-39), I focus and research a lot on recovery in order for me to maintain my fitness. If your age is 40 to 49, that is a veteran category. Hence, I discovered 3 types of recovery. Resting which include sleep for muscle repair and mind concentration, nutrition such as vitamins for cells repair especially our heart and muscles, and stretching for loosen tensed muscle. This are the reasons why athletes nowadays recover faster, can work longer, jump higher and run faster.
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Stretching exercise do not only recovers the stressed body but also essential for those people with joint problems. Pilates and yoga also a type of workout which can be used for losing weight.
Few of my friends suggested that it is impossible for these workout to be conducted to lose weight since is low intensity. That opinion is wrong, because if we do a session of pilates for 45 minutes up to 1 hour, it is a full body workout and our heart rate is increasing especially doing some crazy moves like hand-stand or tabletop balancing. The science behind this theory is that if our heart rate is maintained at 150bpm to 165bpm consistently around 45 min, it actually burning calories. I tried these workout especially pilates mix with yoga, suprisingly the amount of sweat shredded was equivalent to my running, and my rate rate sometimes increased up to 160 bpm.
In order to calculate the effect of the recovery workout (pilates/yoga), the results must be measurable. It can be measure buy leverage rating from 1 to 10. If the exercise is for losing weight, it can be measured just by weight scale. In my humble opinion through trial myself, I strongly believed recovery exercise is essencial and suitable for all ages and fitness levels. It has tremendous results not only for recovery and burn fats, but also tone your body with lean muscles.
