Hopefully, you are starting to feel like veterans at this point (or at least not quite so sore!). If it hasn’t been hammered home to you by this point, please continue to talk to your Coaches on the best scaling options for you. The point is not to hit a workout and be so sore you can’t come and train again for like 4 days. That being said, even if you have the best workouts in the gym, you are really shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t look at your lifestyle outside the gym. Sleep, nutrition, and stress all effect how much effort you can put into your workouts and how fast you can recover from a tough workout. You don’t have have to change everything overnight but do talk to your Coaches so you can start with small changes to your lifestyle.

-Bryant

After finishing a tough workout, you may have felt the soreness the day or two after. To avert this soreness is by performing a proper and thorough warm-up, stretching afterwards, proper scaling, staying hydrated after your workout, post-workout nutrition, stress management and sleep. Your muscles, joints, and tensions (tendons?) all need water to function properly, so remaining hydrated is extremely important post workout.  Sleep and stress go hand in hand so poor sleep and poor stress management will impair your recovery and your performance. For sleep, aim for 8-9 hours in a dark, quiet, cool room, if possible.

Ensure you are ready for your workout by taking time before and after to increase mobility and flexibility. Mobility is the active range of motion and having that full range of motion at the joint is something that most of us have lost by sitting in a chair all day long. In the case of improving mobility and flexibility, more often is better than longer; so 10 minutes a day is better than 70 minutes in one day.

The most basic approach that you can take toward eating in a healthful manner would be to only eat real food. With the advent of increasing industrialization of our food supply, novel food-like products have been brought into our diet that have negative effects on our health and performance. “Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar.” The idea behind eating Paleo is that humans were originally hunter-gatherers that ate primarily animals, vegetables, roots, and some fruits. Therefore, grains, dairy, and legumes are not recommended as they were not part of the human diet until recently in our evolutionary history. Paleo is about the quality of food, and zone focuses on quantity. The approach centers on weighing and measuring your food—30% fat, 30% protein, and 40% carbohydrate.