Whether you wake up with an icy shower or have seen any videos of Wim “The Ice Man” Hof, someone has probably told you that cold plunges are great for your health.

Anyone who’s jumped into cold water understands the enormous jolt of energy and endorphins that immediately surge through your body.

But what is cold water immersion (CWI) actually doing for you? And where does it fit within an intelligent recovery plan?
 

 
Like all other recovery/regeneration methods, the how always comes back to the autonomic nervous system. Remember, this is made up of the sympathetic “fight or flight” and parasympathetic “rest and recover” systems.

When you initially jump into frigid water, the “cold shock” response is classic sympathetic system at work: your heart races and your blood pressure skyrockets as your vessels constrict.

That voice inside your head that tells you to “GET OUT OF THE WATER,” is a full-blown flight response. Being freezing cold is stressful.

If you are too cold, for too long, you can die. There are very real survival mechanisms that get turned on when you jump in icy water.

One of the main things that quickly happens is your core temperature is lowered and your blood vessels contract to drive blood to your heart, lungs, and other organs. This can help stimulate the immune system, reduce pain, and decrease inflammation.

It sounds like CWI is a perfect recipe for recovery, but there’s a catch…

When to use CWI… and when not to.

Inflammation, just like stress, isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, your inflammatory response is actually part of a signaling pathway that tells your body to adapt and improve after your workouts.

It’s a big piece of how the body knows that tissues have been stressed and need to be repaired. It’s through this repair process that they become more fit.

So, here’s the catch with CWI…

On the one hand, using CWI immediately after workout has been shown to have an impact by quickly reducing core body temperature and causing a faster restoration of explosive power and strength back to baseline levels.
 

 
Sounds like a good thing, right?

The problem is that at the same time, when you dampen your inflammatory response right after a workout with a cold shower, bath, or float (especially if you do this repeatedly), you run the risk of decreasing your body’s signals to improve.

In other words, the cost of the short-term recovery benefits is that they may interfere with the potential long-term benefits of training.

Research has shown this to be particularly the case when it comes to trying to build bigger, stronger muscles.

That means that whether or not you should use CWI after a workout, practice, or game, depends on the situation.

If you’re training twice a day or have a limited amount of time to recover before you have to train or perform again, it can make sense to use CWI to help speed up recovery.
 

 
If your HRV and recovery scores in Morpheus are showing that you’re heading in the wrong direction, particularly if you’re seeing your HRV persistently higher than normal, it can be valuable to use CWI to tamp down inflammation and give your body a recovery boost.

In this case, the benefits can outweigh the potential costs.

But if your recovery is generally where it needs to be and you can control when and how hard you train, it’s generally best to avoid finishing your workout or practice by jumping in an ice bath.

What about a morning shower or plunge?

A morning cold shower or plunge is much less likely to have an impact on your training from the previous day.

Here, the primary benefits are likely the feeling you get from the endorphin rush (many people report an overall improvement in mood), and the potential for a boost in immune function.

So, if you enjoy incorporating some form of cold into your daily morning routine and it makes you feel better, chances are good that it’s helping you.

The key is to recognize that just like anything else, your body will get used to cold exposure. If you do it every single morning, it will lose its effectiveness. Cycling through periods of doing it and taking a break is a good way to maximize the benefits.

How cold and for how long?

Just like with training, we can think of the stress of CWI in terms of volume and intensity. The “intensity” is the water temperature and the “volume” is how long you stay in it.

And just like with training, the key is to start off with less volume and intensity and only build up to more as necessary.

If you use too much, the cost of the stress will outweigh the benefits, no matter when you do it.

A general recommendation for water temperature range based on the research is between 12-14° C (54-57° F). When it comes time, anywhere from 10-17 minutes of total exposure within those temperature ranges is common.

Always keep in mind that the colder the water temp you use, the shorter the total amount of time you need to be in it to have the same benefits.

It’s also important to consider that total body immersion, particularly if you put your head under water, is a much higher level of stress than a cold shower.

As always, the devil is in the dose. Monitoring your HRV and recovery with Morpheus can help you make sure you’re on the right track.

Action step

If you’ve never tried any form of CWI, a cold shower is the easiest way to get started. Even just a minute or two in the morning can help your body build tolerance before you take the next step.

Monitor your HRV closely using Morpheus, especially during prolonged periods of stress. If you start to see signs of parasympathetic overreaching, try using CWI to get back on track.

By mental performance coach Brian Cain

As someone who cares about fitness, you know the importance of what happens inside the gym; but a huge part of recovery for optimal performance takes place outside of the gym, inside our heads.

Developing strategies to “turn off” the stress response and shift into recovery mode gives you a massive advantage in today’s intensity-driven, grind-or-die culture.

Plain and simple, managing stress is key for personal fitness success, whether that means losing weight or setting a PR.

Mental stress takes up a lot of your limited energy reserves and sabotages recovery. Ultimately, it limits the level of results you’ll see from the work you put in at the gym.

If you don’t address the mental side of recovery, it won’t matter how intelligent your programming is or how hard you’re willing to work; your health, fitness, and performance will suffer.

It’s THAT important.

That’s why I want to share a simple, 4-step process you can use to combat stress.

This is the same process I use to help world-champion UFC fighters stay calm in the cage, winning pitchers release stress and stay focused on the mound in front of millions of people—and you can use it to manage your day-to-day stress.

The 4-step process to turn off stress, ramp up recovery, and get better results
 

 
Step #1: Recognize

That which you’re aware of, you can change. That which you’re NOT aware of, you can’t do anything about.

The first step toward combating stress in your life is to recognize when and where it’s happening so you can begin to DO something to offset it.

To provide a concrete, visual of how you can heighten your awareness and become more attuned to stressful situations, I use a process called “recognizing your signal lights.”

This idea of “signal lights of stress” is just like driving a car.

If you’re driving your car and you come to a green light, you GO. There isn’t any thought process, you just go. But if you’re driving your car and you come to a yellow or red light, you slow down and STOP.

You can use this same concept to evaluate your stress levels, and if necessary, stop it in its tracks, turn it off, and get your body back into balance.

Simply becoming more aware of when your stress levels are rising to a yellow or red level is a great place to start, but I want to give you a method I use to help identify your signal lights, called “BFS.”

BFS is an acronym that stands for body language, focus, and self-talk.
 

 
By evaluating these three components, you can get a clear idea of whether your stress levels are a green, yellow, or red light. Let me roll through an example for you…

Body Language: In a green light situation (where stress is low), my body language is big, strong, my shoulders are back, head is up; I feel good, in control.

In a yellow or red light situation⁠—where stress is building or at a point where it’s negatively affecting health and performance⁠—my body language is small, my shoulders are slumped, back is tight, I just feel stiff.

Focus: In a green light situation, I’m in a state of present awareness where I’m dialed in on what I’m doing right now and why it’s important. In a yellow or red light situation, my focus is on the past or on the future; it’s on outcomes, not the process.

Self-Talk: In a green light situation, self-talk is often third person and confident: “You’ve got this.” In a yellow or red light situation, self-talk is usually third person and it’s negative: “I can’t believe you did that, you always make these kinds of mistakes.”

Your body language, focus, and self-talk are like a temp gauge for your stress levels. If more than one of these is trending toward a yellow or red light situation, you have to be able to recognize that and put a plan into place to turn things around—we’ll get to that in a minute.

For now, I want you to practice becoming more aware of your BFS so you can identify where your stress levels are at. This can take time, but it’s well worth it. With time, being able to instantly evaluate your “BFS” will become like second nature to you.

Use the “BFS” process to evaluate where your signal lights of stress are at:

• If you’re hitting green lights: Keep cruising.
• If you start hitting yellow and red lights: STOP — and apply the “release and refocus” process we’re going to cover next…

Step #2: Release
 

 
When you recognize a yellow or red light with BFS, you need to immediately go into a release routine to turn off the stress response and get back into recovery mode.

Your 3-step release routine is to:

1. Do something physical.
2. Take a deep breath on a focal point.
3. Have a verbal trigger.

Step #1: Do something physical. The idea here is to take a physical action that initiates your release routine. This might be clapping your hands together forcefully, taking a piece of paper and throwing into the garbage can.

Step #2: Take a deep breath on a focal point. A focal point is a spot you look at while taking a deep breath that reminds you to come back to the present moment.

You could use a sticky note on your desk or computer with the word “focus” on it. Maybe you focus on the watch on your wrist to remind you to focus on the present moment. The options are limitless, but the idea is the same: find something you can use to come back to the present moment and “go green.”

Step #3: Have a verbal trigger. The verbal trigger is the final signal that releases us from the stressful situation, knocking us back into recovery mode and bringing us back to the present moment.

Your verbal trigger could be as simple as saying the word “release,” to indicate letting go of the stress you’re experiencing.

Or, maybe you’ll say “recover” to tell your body and mind, “Hey, we’re letting this stress go and getting back into a state of recovery.”

The most important thing is to choose a verbal trigger you can remember that will effectively get you back to the present moment.

Putting this all together:

Any time your BFS indicates that your stress is at yellow or red light levels, immediately go into your release routine: do something physical, take a deep breath on a focal point, and say your verbal trigger.

Step 3: Refocus
 

 
When you recognize a yellow or red light, you immediately go into your release routine. The final step in the process is to refocus. Let’s now talk about two steps in training your refocus:

1. Take a deep breath on a focal point.
2. Have a final thought, image, or feeling, or what I often call a TIF.

First, take a deep breath. When you finish the release routine we outlined in step 2, you simply take a deep breath to focus on what you’re going to do next.

You’re essentially resetting—or refocusing—your body and your mind to be in a state of focus and relaxation.

Finally, you complete the process with a final thought, image, or feeling that helps you refocus on being in a peaceful, green light situation.

This could be thinking about how confident you’ll feel if you make the difficult, healthy nutrition choice; or feeling what it will be like to sink the game-winning free throw.

The idea is to choose a final TIF that will help release the stress of that situation and refocus what’s going to get you back to a place of peace and recovery.

Step #4: Repeat
 

 
This one’s simple, but not necessarily easy — repeat the process any time you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed, or when your BFS indicates your stress levels are in a yellow or red light situation.

With practice, you’ll discover applying this process is something you can do in just a few seconds—and it’s something you can literally use over and over again throughout the day.

Over time, the compound effect will kick in, often leading to life-changing results.

Action Step

By applying the stress-release process you’ve learned today, not only will you be able to improve the ability to turn off stress and get back into recovery mode, you’ll also notice that you’re able to stay calm under pressure and make better choices.

Take a moment to identify your BFS signal lights, write out a 3-step release routine, and choose a refocusing TIF.

Play out how you’ll go through this process the next time you’re mentally stressed.

When people go to get a massage from a therapist, it’s usually either because A) They have an injury, soreness, or pain that they want treated or B) they want to relax and reduce stress.

While both of these are good reasons, they are both reactive.

People wait until they’re injured or in pain. They let stress get the better of them and then they decide to get a massage to relax.

One of the keys to recovery, and particularly soft tissue management, is to be proactive in your approach.
 

 
The most effective strategy isn’t to wait until something is wrong to try and fix it. It’s to prevent it from breaking in the first place.

Fortunately, today, there are more self-treatment soft tissue tools than ever before. The amount of rollers, percussion devices, rollers, balls, body tempering tools, and other similar products is almost endless these days.

That makes it easier and more affordable than ever to take care of yourself. You don’t have to be a pro athlete on an unlimited budget to manage your soft tissue and improve your recovery.

Why do you need to take care of your soft tissue?

There are a lot of reasons that it’s incredibly important to be proactive about taking care of your soft tissue. The single biggest of them is that they are directly connected to both movement and recovery.

That’s because your soft tissues are what produce and transmit the force it takes to move your body. That means the more you move and the more force you ask them to generate, the more stress you’re placing them under.

Getting in the gym and training is a lot of stress on virtually all of our soft tissues because of the high forces we’re generating during a workout.

Over time, our vast network of soft tissues like muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascia, can respond to stress in a variety of ways.

One one hand, it can cause them to become stronger, more resilient, more pliable, more efficient, and more resilient to injury.

On the other hand, stress can also lead to changes that are much less beneficial.

Changes in length-tension relationships that restrict our movements. Trigger points that create and refer pain throughout the body. Activation of our sympathetic nervous system that slows down recovery.
 

 
The way to prevent these things from happening is to be proactive about helping our soft tissues deal with all the stress we place on them on a daily basis.

When we do this, we’re able to move more efficiently, stay healthier, recover faster, and perform our best.

How do soft tissue tools and methods work?

There are a lot of things that are well-understood about massage and various treatments, and there are a lot of things that still aren’t.

The body is endlessly complex. Science can’t always answer exactly why some treatments work, but one of the key pieces of soft tissue treatment and management is applying pressure and compression into a specific area, or areas. When it comes right down to it, that’s most of what this type of work is really all about.

Pressure, in the right amount and at the right places, is an input into our nervous system that can cause changes in how our soft tissues function. That’s because it’s the nervous system that is what controls so much of how much tension all these tissues are under.

Muscles being “tight” or “loose” is much more about the nervous system than it is about the muscles and supporting tissues themselves.

So the real goal of most soft tissue treatment methods is to impact our nervous system. We want to stimulate the nervous system to reduce tension, drive blood flow, and help our soft tissues recover from the stress of life and training.

The first part of doing that is picking the right tools for the job.

Best tools for the job

To help you sort through all the options, I’ve got three personal recommendations of proven winners for you. Each represents a different price point so you can choose based on your budget, and all of them can help you effectively manage your soft tissue.

Accumobility Ball
 

 
The Accumobility Ball is one of the most versatile soft tissue tools on the market, and it’s a big step up from the traditional golf or tennis ball you have to chase around the room when it gets out from under you.

The biggest reason is because it’s stable. It’s also extremely budget friendly and easy to transport.

The primary function it serves is to provide direct pressure and compression in an effective and easy-to-use way.

It’s built to be stable on the floor or even against a wall, so the potential applications are endless.

Even better, the company has a variety of instructional videos showing you how to use it on every muscle group imaginable.

The accumobility ball comes in two densities to provide either firm or medium pressure. I recommend you get both, but if you only choose one, I’d opt for the firm pressure.

Kabuki Boomstick
 

 
The Boomstick is built around the concept of body tempering, which was invented and popularized by Powerlifter Donny Thompson.

Think of it as a deep tissue massage on steroids.

Its density allows you to apply far more pressure directly than lighter tools like foam rollers. When you combine this pressure with active movement, it can be incredibly powerful for breaking up adhesions, turning off trigger points, and restoring normal mobility.

It also works extremely well with the accumobility ball. You can use them together in what Kabuki Strength calls “The Vice Method,” to compress muscles from both sides.

Just like with the accumobility ball, Kabuki provides a wide range of instructional videos to help you get the most out of the Boomstick and all their other recovery tools.

Theragun
 

 
The Theragun is the most expensive soft tissue tool of the three, but it’s also the one that’s based on percussion, rather than direct pressure and compression. The use of percussive massage guns is relatively new in the sports and fitness market compared to more traditional soft tissue tools.

The biggest difference is that percussion, rather than more constant pressure and compression, offers another type of “input” to the nervous system than other manual tissue tools. It’s also next to impossible to replicate this type of stimulation with any other tool or technique.

Research has shown a measurable increase in range of motion, as well as a decreased feeling of soreness after use. This is likely due to the effectiveness of percussion in driving blood flow into the area where it’s used.

Another big plus is that it’s incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is run the Theragun over the areas you want to treat, so there’s very little learning curve or practice required to see immediate benefits.

There are a variety of different Theragun models at various price points. They all feature the same core percussion technology, with differences in size, features, and price point. Any of them will get the job done.

Action step

If you’re already incorporating soft tissue work into your weekly recovery program, great job. Keep it up.

If you’re not, pick one of the three tools above and start small. Begin by using it within your workouts for a few weeks and see how you feel.

You may be surprised at just how much of a difference it makes in how you feel, how you move, and how well it helps you recover.

Co-authored by Bill Hartman and Mike Robertson, founders of IFAST.

When it comes to optimizing movement and recovery, the two most crucial pieces of the health and performance “puzzle”, nothing is more important than proper breathing mechanics.

Dr. Karel Lewit once said: “If breathing is not normalized—no other movement pattern can be.”

If you’re breathing poorly, everything else is going to be out of whack, at least to some extent. Proper breathing is that important.

Get your breathing right, and you have the raw materials to build upon so that every other system in your body can work together to facilitate optimal movement and recovery.

From a movement or performance standpoint, this should be obvious.

If you aren’t breathing effectively and efficiently, how can you expect to perform well in an activity where the most basic requirement is the effective utilization of oxygen?

Breathing influences movement patterns, posture, pain, as well as performance. It does this by altering the position of the musculoskeletal system, causing restriction of airflow leading to underinflation or hyperinflation of your lungs, thus creating a mechanical barrier that limits movement.

In other words, in a very real way, being able to move optimally during performance and exercise comes back to the ability to breathe effectively.
 

 
Recovery is affected in a similarly detrimental way. To really understand optimal recovery, we have to look past the muscles to the nervous system.

Recovery of the nervous system is a powerful influencer in regard to regaining the capacity to provide output to the movement system.

If your nervous system is chronically fatigued, it won’t matter how “effective” your training program is; your results will be less than what they could be.

Remember: everything is interconnected.

Put simply, as your nervous system gets more sympathetically dominant from being overtaxed, overstressed, and fatigued, your body becomes:

1. less efficient at facilitating movement (i.e. your performance during the workout session or competition is below what you’d be capable of in an optimal physiological environment).
2. less capable of facilitating the recovery processes after your workout session or competition ends (which means you will be walking around in a low-level state of fatigue and your performance will be compromised the next time you show up for a workout or competition—and continued for long enough, this will negatively affect overall health).

Addressing each environmental and behavioral aspect of stress is important, but if I had to establish a “hierarchy”, developing better breathing patterns would constantly be at the top.

In terms of recovery, proper breathing can shift the nervous system from its stressed, sympathetically dominant state toward a more restorative, recovery based parasympathetic state.

The good news?

You can “train” respiration just like you can a muscle or any other component of health and fitness.

Let’s talk about how:

3 simple breathing exercises to improve movement and recovery

The reality is that most people breathe ineffectively (or at the very least, less than optimally). But you can change that.

So let’s give you some tools to start training (and improving) your breathing patterns right now.

Bear Breathing
 

 

• Position yourself on all fours on the floor
• Hands should be directly below the shoulders and knees directly below the hips
• Push long through the arms as if to push away from the floor until you feel a stretch between the shoulder blades
• Bring the knees off the floor until the shin is horizontal to the floor
• Hold this position as you take 3-5 full breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth
• Relax and breath normally for a few seconds
• Repeat and perform 3-5 repetitions

Wall Breathing
 

 

• Stand with your back against a wall and feet hip width and 10-12 inches from the wall
• Posteriorly tilt the pelvis to flatten the lower back against the wall
• Reach forward maximally with both hands allowing the upper back to round forward
• Hold this position for 3-5 breaths and then relax
• Repeat and perform 3-5 repetitions

Forearm Plank Breathing
 

 

• Lay face down on the floor
• Place the hands below the face palm down on the floor such that they form a diamond shape with the index fingers and thumbs
• Push through the forearms and push the shoulders forward to lift the chest and abdomen upward off the floor until weight is only on the forearms and pubic bone
• Hold the upward position and perform 3-5 full breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth
• Return to the starting position
• Repeat and perform 3-5 repetitions

Action Step

The great thing about these recovery breathing exercises is that they can be used just about any time.

They’re incredibly easy to incorporate into a dynamic warm-up or cooldown, and you can even do them at home. After just a couple of minutes of doing this type of breathing, you’ll often feel noticeably looser and more relaxed. That’s because they help turn on the parasympathetic nervous system.

Try incorporating a couple of these exercises into your daily routine and you’ll quickly feel the difference.

Although fighters and other combat athletes have used the sauna over the years to drop those last few extra pounds of water weight, one of its best uses is for recovery and regeneration.

This is something the Finnish know well. The sauna has been a part of their culture for generations.

The sauna falls into the stimulation category of regeneration because it drives your heart rate up and core temperature up, meaning it’s a form of stress because it activates the stress response system.
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That means it can be particularly effective during periods of intense training where you’re starting to see HRV consistently higher than normal. This can happen during prolonged periods where you’re under more stress than you can effectively recover from.

When this happens, your parasympathetic “rest & recover” system can become burnt out from constantly trying to kick your body into a recovery state.

This is often called parasympathetic overreaching or overtraining.

When you get to this point, it’s common to feel general fatigue, lack of motivation to train, higher HRV, lower resting HR, and lower heart rates during training, excessive sleep, etc.

The sauna works because it provides a very mild sympathetic stimulus that triggers the body’s adaptive mechanisms without placing physical stress on the body.

It’s akin to jump starting a car; it gets things going again.

This is pretty the same as how all stimulation regeneration techniques work, as we’ve discussed in previous lessons.

Why not use this method all the time as a preventive measure for overtraining?

It can be easy to think that using the sauna, or other types of stimulation methods, all the time is a good way to really turbocharge your recovery.

The problem with this idea is that you need a certain amount of daily and weekly stress to force the body to adapt to it and get more fit.

If you are constantly using these types of regeneration methods to promote recovery all the time, you may lose the benefits of the loading.

Remember, stress itself isn’t bad. Without it, you’d never improve.

It’s too much stress for too long, i.e. more than your body can recover from, that’s what you need to avoid.

If you feel like you have to use the sauna or other regeneration methods all the time, you’d probably be better off dialing back the level of stress in the first place.

The key is knowing when to use the sauna, as well as getting the dose right, as we’ve covered before. And that’s why we pay attention to your Morpheus recovery score and trends in your HRV.

Using The Sauna the Right Way
 

 
To get the most out of the sauna, it’s important to be pretty specific in how you use it.

Just hopping in for a few minutes and getting out probably won’t do a whole lot for stimulating regeneration.

Make sure to use a dry sauna for this method, not a steam room, wet sauna, or infrared sauna. The hotter you can get it, the better–preferably over 200° F (93.3°C).

Next, to manipulate your body temperature, it’s valuable to have shower close by to really do the method correctly. Fortunately, most saunas tend to be in locker rooms or near a shower.

Assuming you have a dry sauna that gets very hot and a nearby shower, you’ve got everything you need to use the sauna to promote recovery so you can keep training or get back to it.
 

 
Note that if you overuse any regeneration method by doing it all the time, it will lose its effectiveness.

That’s why we’re covering a range of regeneration methods in these lessons. By the end of this 30-day challenge, you’ll know how to use different ones depending on the situation.

You can use the sauna for a week or two at a time, then use something else the next time you need to promote recovery.

The Ultimate Sauna Recovery Method

What I’m going to share with you is an old-school Russian sauna method. It takes some time to do, but it’s an effective line of defense against chronic stress when you need it.

Try to follow these specific guidelines as closely as possible for the greatest recovery benefit:

1. Preheat the sauna to the highest temperature possible, at least 200° F (93.3°C) is preferable
2. Get in the sauna and stay until you first break a sweat, then get out
3. Rinse off for 5-10 seconds in lukewarm water, then get out of the shower, pat yourself off, wrap a towel around yourself, and sit down for 2-3 minutes
4. Get back in the sauna and stay for 5-10 minutes. The original method calls for staying in until 150 drops of sweat have dripped off your face. For most people, this is 5-10 minutes
5. Take another shower, this time make it as cold as possible, and stay in it for 30 seconds. Let the water cover your head completely the entire time
6. Get out of the shower, pat yourself dry, wrap a towel around yourself, and sit down and relax until you stop sweating completely and your skin is dry. This typically takes anywhere from 3-10 minutes
7. Return to the sauna and stay in for 10-15 minutes, then get out
8. Repeat steps 5 and 6
9. Get back in the sauna for another 10-15 minutes, then get out
10. Take another shower, this time make it fairly warm, and stay in for 1-2 minutes
11. Dry yourself completely off, lay down and relax for 5-10 minutes

The reason this method is so effective is because it manipulates heat and body temperature to stimulate both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems in sequence. When used the right way, it can be an incredibly effective way to boost your recovery.

Action step:

Identify the most convenient sauna/shower for you to use in your area. Common places include large gyms, bath houses/spas, apartment complexes, etc.

If your Morpheus recovery data shows you’d benefit from regeneration methods, (your HRV is climbing and your resting HR is dropping in spite of feeling chronically fatigued/lethargic), give the sauna method a try.

Hydrotherapy is probably the most widely used treatment for ailments in human history. It’s been written about since pre-biblical times. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, prescribed soaking in spring water for all types of illness.
 

 
Given that more than 99% of the molecules that make up our body are water, it’s not surprising that it can have healing properties. In today’s world, there are almost endless types of water-based therapies available, but the two we’ll cover in this lesson are:

• Warm/hot water soaking
• Aquatic exercise

These tend to be the most easily accessible, have measurable benefits, and can be directly connected to recovery.

Warm/hot water soaking
 

 
Soaking a heated pool of water is probably the single oldest therapy there is. All it takes is a few minutes of immersion to start to feel better. Common benefits associated with soaking in water include:

• Reduced pain
• Better movement
• Increased immunity
• Lower blood pressure
• Mental relaxation

Not surprisingly, these are many of the same benefits reported from exercise. The simple reason for that is that working out and soaking in a warm or hot tub are both linked to increased blood flow throughout the body.

If you measure your heart rate in a hot tub, you may be surprised to learn that it can go all the way up to 100bpm or more—the same as a moderate speed walk for many people.

This is because when you’re submerged in warm water, blood pressure decreases and makes it much easier for your heart to pump blood and oxygen. At the same time, water immersion reduces some of the effects of gravity and allows for general muscle relaxation.

The end result is that you get many of the same effects and benefits of exercise by increasing circulation, without putting stress on your muscles and supporting tissues.

When you get out of the water, your body shifts more towards a parasympathetic recovery state as it reduces core body temperature and lowers heart rate.

This is why you often feel so relaxed and sleep better.

The key to using hot water therapy to promote recovery effectively is getting the dose right. Using a temperature that’s too high or spending too much time in the water can have the opposite effects.

The temperature range most well-supported in the research is 100-104° F (38-40° C), which is close to our natural human body temperature. Going significantly cooler than that may reduce some of the benefits, and going much hotter can cause too much of an increase in core body temperature.

A general guideline to shoot for is to soak for between 10-30 minutes, depending on the temperature of the water. The rule of thumb is the hotter the water, the fewer minutes you should soak in it.

A particularly good time to soak is around 90 minutes before you plan to go to bed. There’s research that this can speed up how quickly you are able to fall asleep, while also supporting better sleep quality as well.

Aquatic exercise
 

 
While soaking in warm/hot water can provide a range of health benefits, exercising in water has even more potential to speed up recovery. It’s not just for the elderly or the injured.

More and more athletes and teams are turning to training in the water to build fitness, enhance recovery, and stay healthy.

That’s because training in the water can supercharge blood flow even higher than soaking, with research showing circulation to deep tissues can be up to 200% greater when submerged up to the neck.

This is due to the movement and the pressure changes that come from being surrounded in a larger pool of water.

Given how easy it is to move underwater, you can perform almost an infinite number of exercises and movement patterns.

A particularly effective way to use the pool to promote recovery is to focus on muscles that were worked at higher intensities the previous day.

Getting in the pool and doing 3-4 sets of 8-10 jump squats or lunges in the water a day after a hard lower body workout can have a huge impact on soreness and recovery.

This type of training is also perfect for incorporating the recovery workouts we’ve talked about.

A simple, but highly effective, pool workout to help drive recovery is one I used for years with some of the world’s best combat athletes:

• 5 min of deep water treading to warm up
• 5 min of shallow water mobility exercises
• 4-6 sets of 8-10 reps of jump squats/lunges or other exercises
• 5-10 min lap swim
• 5 min of deep water floating for cool down

 

 
The advantage to this type of training is that it doesn’t take much time, won’t add any stress on your joints or soft tissues, and it drives a ton of blood flow throughout every tissue in the body.

Even a single pool workout per week can make a noticeable difference in your ability to recover from your higher intensity sessions and the stress of life.

Taken together, soaking in warm/hot water and training in the water have been used for centuries for a reason. They can effectively boost your recovery while supporting all-around health, wellness, and even longevity.

Action step

Try taking a hot bath 7 nights in a row around 90 minutes before bedtime. Look at your total sleep time and average HRV across the week and see if you notice a difference in your recovery.

If you have access to a pool, try to fit in at least one recovery workout in the water this week.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what recovery is, why it’s so important, and how it’s connected to your lifestyle, it’s time to dig into some popular tools and methods promising to help you improve it.

Over the next 10 lessons, I’m going to help you separate fact from fiction and dig into how to incorporate regeneration strategies into your overall recovery program.

To get things started, we need to talk about the basics of how all regeneration methods work to begin with.
 

 
Relaxation vs. stimulation

Although all the biological processes and mechanisms around adapting to stress are incredibly complex, the basic principle underlying efforts to speed up recovery is quite simple.

It all comes down to getting the body to expend less energy dealing with stress, i.e. turn down the stress response, and spend more energy on recovery by turning up the recovery response.

This means shifting the body away from a sympathetic state to a more parasympathetic state.

While there are almost endless strategies to achieve this, there are generally two different approaches. They can be defined as either relaxation or stimulation, depending on the immediate effect they have on the body.

The goal of relaxation methods is to cause an immediate decrease in sympathetic activity.

These types of methods generally revolve around things like mindfulness drills, meditation, breathing, float tanks, and soft tissue therapies.

During the activity itself, the goal is to drive heart rate down and HRV up.
 

 
This is an indication that the body is turning down the stress-response system and shifting more towards a recovery state.

The other path is stimulation.

In this case, the concept of hormesis becomes important to understand.

This concept can be best summarized by a 16th century alchemist named Paracelsus, who was one the first to write about it when he said:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

What this means is simply that the body often responds to the same thing very differently depending on the dose. This is particularly true when it comes to the stress of training.

The right amount of training can increase your fitness to almost unimaginable levels compared to where you started. Too much training, however, can leave you broken down, injured and less fit.

This same concept applies to stimulation types of regeneration methods.

They work by putting the body under a relatively small amount of stress in order to trigger the body to then activate the recovery response afterwards.

Things like recovery workouts, cold plunges, contrast therapy, the sauna, etc., all drive heart rate up when you’re doing them. This has the added benefit of increasing blood flow, another key part of recovery because it drives oxygen and nutrients into the tissues.
 

 
After you’re done with these types of methods, you should see a decrease in heart rate and feel increasingly relaxed in the hours following.

The key here is the dose.

Too much of any stimulation method can cause too much stress and slow down recovery rather than speed it up.

Do a recovery workout for 90 minutes straight or spend so much time in the sauna that you become dehydrated, and you won’t do your recovery any favors.

Where do regeneration methods fit in?

The use of regeneration methods can be incredibly powerful when they are incorporated correctly, or a waste of time (or worse) when they’re not.

With so many tools and tech popping up all the time, it can be tempting to buy into the hype and go all-in on a single method.

But just as with training itself, there is no one-size-fits-all approach or single method that always works, all the time, for everyone. The key is to be strategic about when and how you use regeneration strategies.

This is where it becomes hugely valuable to use Morpheus to:

A) evaluate how well your regeneration methods are working
B) build a personalized regeneration strategy

In the coming lessons, we’ll cover exactly how to do that.

Action step

Are you using any regeneration strategies now? Have you used any in the past?

If so, make a quick list and see where they fall in the categories of relaxation or stimulation.

This will help you choose the right methods as we talk more about putting together your personal regeneration strategy.

Written by Guest Expert Robb Wolf, former research biochemist and 2X New York Times/WSJ Best Selling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired To Eat.

So, you just wrapped up a solid training session and are wondering what to eat to optimize your hard work.

What do you eat?

Well, it depends.

What is your primary goal? Fat loss? Muscle gain? Improving a specific physical attribute like endurance, strength or power?

Your primary goal should dictate not just a significant portion of how you compose your post-training meal (including timing), but it should inform your overall nutritional strategy.

Ok, so your primary goal is a biggie in this story, but perhaps the next most important feature is what you actually DID for training.

A blistering session of hard glycolytic intervals will likely need a very different post-training meal than a neurological-based strength session with low volume but high intensity (based on a percentage of repetition maximum).

Instead of tackling all this with iron-clad specifics (“eat exactly this”), let’s look at this more as the parameters that will influence what you eat after your workout.

I think the following is a solid way to think about post-training nutrition:

Protein

 
Regardless of your goals and training, orienting your meal towards ADEQUATE protein is going to be a win.

“Adequate protein” is arguably anything north of about 30g of dense protein that is rich in branched chain amino acids, particularly leucine. This appears to be a minimum threshold to hit if we are to produce anabolic signaling, nutrient partitioning and all the good things we associate with protein.

30g is by no means the top end here, but should rather be viewed as a minimum.

Carbs

 
Total amount of carbs will be based on your training, goals and individual physiology. Some people do well on a high carb intake, others thrive on lower relative levels.

Higher intensity, glycolytic activities will produce a greater need for carb intake,, while more neuro-based strength work will likely require less.

Fats

 
Similar to carbs, fat intake will be highly dependent on your individual situation.

Some people do quite well on lower total fat intake while others are crushed by this type of plan. Ultra-endurance athletes appear to benefit (in general) from a fat-centric dietary approach (although targeted carbs are critical for most).

So, how do we take the above and put something together that looks like a post-training meal?!

1. Make sure to hit that minimum of 30g dense protein.
2. Be aware of the tradeoffs of fat and carbs as they relate to your needs, specific training etc.
    
   Hard glycolytic sessions necessitate more carbs, a genetic predisposition towards carb intolerance may reduce carb need and/or efficacy. You likely have a sense of where you are in this story.
3. The post training meal should constitute between 20-33% of your daily calories. If you eat 3 meals per day, that 33% level is likely good. If you eat more meals, you can certainly drop that down closer to the 20% amount.

 
I know this is a somewhat vague prescription, so how do we know if we are getting all this right?

• You should be making gains towards your primary goal.
• You should notice improvements in how you look, feel and perform
• Your average HRV score should increase and/or remain at a favorable level.

Based on these guidelines, we can tweak the timing, amounts and ratios of our post-training nutrition to optimize for our individual needs.

With the popularity of Fitbit and other step trackers, you could probably ask any grade-school kid how many steps people should get each day and you’d get the same answer: 10,000.

But where did this number actually come from? And does it have anything to do with health and fitness?

To answer these questions, we have to go back in time to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

In the leadup to the Olympic Games, the Japanese government tried to promote awareness around being active. And in the wake of all that promotion, an opportunistic Japanese company created the “Manpo-Meter”, which literally translates to “step meter.”

Not the most exciting marketing. So, the Manpo-Meter soon became the “Manpo-Kei Meter,” or the “10,000 step meter.”

And that is literally it. All the magic beyond 10,000 steps/day lies in a clever marketing campaign to sell pedometers, not in research or coaching experience.

Which leads us to the natural question of how many steps do you actually need?

How many steps do you really need?

The short answer is that it’s not a number, it’s a range.

New research shows that the floor of that range is around 7,000 steps/day (Paluch et al, 2010). This appears to be enough activity to significantly lower the risk of premature, all-cause mortality in both men and women compared to people who move less.

Intuitively, a minimum number of steps/day makes sense. We know that moving around is an important part of being healthy.

It’s also a number that’s generally enough to support recovery and it’s the number you’ll need to hit each day to earn points throughout the challenge.

But if 7,000 is the minimum number of steps you should take, what’s the maximum? And why is there a maximum in the first place?

To get to the heart of the story, we have to understand the connection between energy and activity.

The easiest way to think of activity is turning energy (in the form of calories) into movement.

The further you go, the more energy it takes to get you there.

On the one hand, we’ve talked about how movement supports recovery and is crucial for health, wellness, and longevity.

On the other hand, energy is also your body’s most important, and limited resource.

The same energy that powers your steps is also required to fuel your workouts, repair damaged tissues, recover from training, power your brain, and perform basic biological functions.

So, if you spend a ton of energy on activity, there will be less available to go towards other areas that are important for health and fitness.

That means to fully answer the question of how many steps are too many, we have to get an idea of roughly how much energy your body’s metabolism can produce a day in the first place.

The metabolic ceiling—why more is not always better

The concept of the metabolic ceiling comes from research by Dr. Herman Pontzer. It started when he was studying a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa called the Hadza tribe.

He wanted to find out how many more calories they burned per day than other, less active populations like those in the west.

When his team crunched all the numbers, he was shocked to find that even though the Hadza were far more active, they ultimately burned roughly the same amount of calories each day.

While it might not make intuitive sense that if you go 20,000 steps a day you’re not actually burning more total calories per day than if you only go 10,000 steps, that’s what his research showed.

The reason for this is what we’ve been discussing. Your body has a limit to how much energy it can produce in a day. Just because the Hadza moved more didn’t change the rules of metabolism.

Dr. Pontzer followed up his initial research to try to better understand these rules of metabolism and what the upper limits are.

Through his work, he discovered this limit appears to be right around 2.5 x the amount of calories your body needs to just stay alive each day. This is also known as your basal metabolic rate or BMR.

So, if your BMR is 1,000 calories, then the most calories your body can produce in a single day will be right around 2,500.

While it’s possible to exceed this limit for short periods of time, his research showed that even top endurance athletes and people doing long, high-mileage treks ultimately ended up falling within this 2.5 x BMR number.

He coined this term the metabolic ceiling.

Your activity sweet spot

The important lesson to learn from Dr. Pontzer’s research is that there is a real cost to being too active. It forces your body to pull energy away from other important areas like recovery, regeneration, and even the immune system.

If you’re trying to improve your fitness, it’s counterproductive to put so much energy into moving and training that your body doesn’t have enough left over to drive recovery and make you more fit.

Because all steps aren’t created equal and there’s a difference between working out and walking, it’s better to consider the upper limit of daily activity in terms of energy (calories) rather than just step count.

To do this, you’ll need to estimate your own metabolic ceiling.

Most people have never had their basal metabolic rate tested before, but you can use what’s called the Mifflin-St Jeor equation to estimate it.

You can find calculators for this formula online. Once you’ve input your height, weight, and age, it will give you an estimated BMR.

From there, multiply this number by 2.5 to get the maximum amount of energy (calories) your body can consistently produce each day.

Using Morpheus and a connected activity tracker, you can gauge how many calories you burn at different activity levels each day. You’ll also be able to see the difference in daily calories and steps depending on your training.

It’s also important to keep in mind that just because the upper limit is 2.5 x BMR, it doesn’t mean that’s how many calories/steps you should shoot for every day. You want to give yourself a bit of a buffer and make sure your body always has plenty of energy to go towards recovery.

This also means it’s a smart strategy to adjust your activity and calories each day based on your recovery in Morpheus.

If your recovery is lower, you want to make sure you have plenty of energy available for the body to repair and regenerate itself. That means sticking closer to the 7,000 steps per day floor than to the upper limit.

When your recovery is higher, on the other hand, then you can be more active and spend more calories on training without worrying about it potentially slowing down your recovery.

Using this strategy, you might not win any competitions for the most steps, but staying within your activity sweet spot each day will help you win the game of fitness (and do well in the challenge).

Action step

Take a few minutes to calculate your BMR using the Mifflin-St. Jeor formula and then multiply by 2.5 to get your metabolic ceiling.

If you’ve been using an activity/calorie tracker, look back through your numbers to see how often you come close to this limit.