There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Revitalize Your Workouts with Smart Recovery
Unlock the secrets to optimal recovery and rejuvenation as we tackle one of the most overlooked aspects of fitness: rest. Ever wondered why some people bounce back so quickly while others struggle to recover? Join me, Rob Maxwell, to explore the transformative power of both passive and active rest. You'll learn how to tailor recuperation strategies to your own unique needs, factoring in age, lifestyle, and workout intensity. We'll guide you through the essential balance between restful sleep and revitalizing activities like yoga and walking, ensuring you achieve better fitness results and enhanced well-being.
In this episode, we also challenge outdated notions about injury recovery, such as the old-school advice of bed rest for back problems. Discover why staying active is now the frontline strategy for healing, boosting blood flow, and aiding recovery. Our discussion emphasizes the importance of personalized recovery plans that focus on working around soreness or injury points rather than stopping altogether. This episode is your go-to guide for crafting a balanced approach to fitness that not only supports your current routines but also elevates your overall health and performance.
Welcome to. There is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell. I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I'm the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work, or maybe why some things don't work, hence the name Method to the Madness. I'm going to pick back up on our principles of health and fitness and get into the principle of recuperation today. Before I get to that, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gildan of the Gildan Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home selling. Please give them a shout to figure out what your home may be worth. 386-451-2412.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about the principle of recuperation. It's one of the biggies, like they all are now. Recuperation means rest, the principle of rest. When we work hard, we need to rest. Everything is in a rhythm and everything is in a balance and, if you remember, from the principle of individuality, everybody is different. With all of these principles, everybody is different. The type and the amount of overload for every individual is going to be different and the program of recuperation for every individual is going to be different and the program of recuperation for every individual is going to be different. It will depend on your age, it will depend upon other stresses in your life, it will depend upon the exercise duration, the exercise intensity, it will depend upon your fueling. There are so many variables with the principle of recuperation, but here talk about the first type of recuperation is simply passive rest, or passive recuperation. That means you're doing nothing. So that's the obvious. I think the obvious anyway, that's making sure that you're sleeping, that's making sure that you're resting your body passively, and passively means you're doing nothing else, compared to actively, which I'll get into in a second. But passive rest is going to be your typical sitting down, lying down, sleep, naps and those types of things which I'll get back to sleep when you get down to it, which I'll get back to sleep when you get down to it. So, yes, one of the big parts of recuperation is you have to get enough rest.
Speaker 1:Now, before we go on and talk about how much sleep is ideal, let me tell you I have studied this over and over there is no ideal amount for everybody. Everybody is different. Each individual is going to require a different amount of sleep and that's probably going to change based on their age, based on life circumstances and based on other variables. Each individual at the moment will have their ideal amount of sleep, but it's not going to be the same for everybody. So when you hear on the news or see in the newspaper or online somebody telling you, you know, seven hours of sleep is ideal, or eight, or whatever they're saying, that's just not true. I mean, that sounds like a decent number, but everybody is different. Some people will need more and some people can use less. It really just depends on that. So there is no exact number. But here again is what we do know Everybody needs to rest. Everybody needs to get the proper amount of sleep for themselves. If you're serious about making results in the gym, if you're serious about losing weight, if you're serious about having a good, high quality life, everybody needs to get their ideal level of sleep and rest. So that's passive rest.
Speaker 1:The other part is active rest. Active rest basically means that by doing certain physical activities, you're actually expediting rest. You are speeding up the recovery processes that allow the body to rest. Active rest is a great technique. It can be in between workouts or in a way. It can be during workouts too. So basically what it means is this it can be during workouts too. So basically what it means is this you hear oftentimes in exercise programming and prescriptions that you should have like a lighter day of exercise following a harder day of exercise. I mean that can be true. Everything comes back to frequency, intensity, time. So it doesn't necessarily have to be programmed that way, but that is a pretty good method. But the reason why it is stated like that is for the sake of active rest.
Speaker 1:It's really better, as far as exercise goes, to use active rest versus passive rest. That doesn't mean don't sleep and don't rest when you're supposed to. No, it has nothing to do with that. What it does mean is, let's say, you have, let's say, your workout routine is strength training pretty vigorously three times a week. So those strength training is anaerobic by nature. So anaerobic by nature always means it's harder. That is harder on the endocrine system and maybe on the muscles. I say maybe because aerobic activities can be pretty tough on the muscles too. Anaerobic activities that become anaerobic can be tough on the endocrine system as well, for sure. But strength training is really meant to be hard, right? Hopefully you say yes, right, yes, right, yes. So strength training is meant to be hard. It's just what it really is and that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:After strength training, instead of taking the entire day off, the next day it would be better to do some form of active rest, and that could be some light cardio, that could be yoga, that could be walking, which I guess is light cardio. But it doesn't necessarily even have to be overly structured, just getting a lot of steps in the next day. It could be like a recreational sport that you really enjoy, like pickleball or tennis or golf. But it'd be better to do active rest in between. Why? Because it speeds up the recovery process, it increases the circulation, it gets all of the good, happy flowing hormones going. That will help recovery and it'll keep your muscles more loose so you're not getting stiff. So active rest is absolutely a good thing to do.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we've got passive recovery that we need to get our sleep. We need to rest when appropriate, naps, whatever we need. Sometimes it's a matter of sitting down enough during the day, you know, not too much, but enough, and again, there's no perfect number for anybody. And then there is active rest, which is doing something light cardio or light recreational in between workouts. The final part of active rest is actually during workouts. So it's really better to move around a little bit in between sets. It's better to stretch a little bit in between sets. It's better to maybe do some range of motion exercises in between sets. You know, as long as they're not impeding your recovery. Like you're not going to do a squat and then follow that with high leg swings to actively rest, no. But if you're doing some upper body and you want to loosen up your lower body, you can do some different types of range of motion exercises in between. Up your lower body. You can do some different types of range of motion exercises in between. We just call that active rest during. It's good sometimes moving around if you have a gym where you can move around a little bit, meaning that you're not clogging up space or you're worried about, like, losing your machine, if you're in a commercial health club or something. I mean those are all legitimate concerns. If you don't have to worry about that, it's just good to move around. Like we'll have people walk some laps around what we call the island just because it's the center multipurpose machine. We'll have people go around it just to kind of not just stand there, because it's better to move everything around. That's another form of active rest, okay. So active rest is important. Passive rest is important, and let's talk about why.
Speaker 1:So catabolic means you're breaking the body down. Catabolic is you are breaking the body down. In strength training what happens is you are pushing the muscles close to exhaustion. The little tiny muscles, our muscle fibers, are split apart a little bit and then they come back together and that's called hypertrophy. But they're somewhat pulled apart a little bit. That's the muscle damage that we want to impose. That's a good thing. But they get broken down and that is a catabolic response. If you are, say, doing hard and long cardio, which can be up, where around two hours or so you can potentially have drained all of your muscle glycogen, so that's catabolic. You're breaking the body down. The tendons sometimes get a little bit broken down, not to the point where you pull the tendon or anything, but a little bit broken down. That's catabolic. The hormonal system gets a little bit depleted. That's catabolic.
Speaker 1:So the only way that we ever Grow is through stress. Right, I talked about that. Eustress E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S is a positive stress. But we're not going to grow in the gym or grow aerobically or really grow anywhere mentally, spiritually, whatever without some stress. We need a little bit of stress to get us moving, so that's normal, but that's called catabolic.
Speaker 1:The only way the good stuff happens, which is anabolic. Anabolic means growth is through rest, like if you did nothing but catabolic, catabolic, catabolic, breakdown, breakdown, breakdown days in a row. You're not going to grow, and a very disciplined athlete will know that and do that. I should say it's disciplined if they know that and do that. Some just don't know. But discipline is knowing that and doing it, meaning that it takes discipline to go. Well, no, I'm not going to do another hard run today because I did that yesterday. I know I want to because I want to burn off some stress in my mind, or I'm bored, or I ate too much the day before and I feel like I need to burn it off. Those aren't overly healthy reasons to go run. So a disciplined person is going to say, well, no, that doesn't fit into the plan today. What fits into the plan is resting, because I want to be good when it counts right.
Speaker 1:So real athletes and I think it's always good to really model after real athletes, real pros or real people, at whatever task they're doing. Real professionals anywhere, like look what they do, because ultimately they're doing things right. So the real athlete doesn't need to be the killer on a training day where they decide their friends are getting together for a recovery jog and then this guy decides he's going to race everybody and pushes himself overly hard, which of course wrecks the anabolic response because now he's broken down even more. No, real athletes aren't going to do that. They're going to be disciplined and say, well, that's not on my program today. You know you guys all go run. That's well and good. You know I'm going to walk, I'm going to jog easily. I'm going to go to the beach and do a longer walk and listen to a podcast, like there's a method to the madness, because I just love listening to that guy. He's awesome. Like, and that's what I'm going to do today. That's great.
Speaker 1:So it actually takes discipline to rest and when you're a little banged up and injured which is different from being a little sore it takes discipline to say I'm going to rest. But the caveat to all this that doesn't mean like. When you're banged up, that doesn't mean you're going to, like not do anything because that's not disciplined either, like maybe your shoulders bothering you, okay, your knees aren't. That doesn't mean you can't go to the gym and do your lower body. That doesn't mean you can't get on the treadmill.
Speaker 1:And sometimes people use being banged up as an excuse. Sometimes they don't know better, like sometimes they see their physician and their physician says you need to rest. Well, physicians aren't always experts when it comes to physical training and sometimes they just didn't explain it all the way, or sometimes they don't know, but ultimately, what they're really trying to say is you need to rest that specific area. So there are plenty of ways round soreness or injury points and the worst thing we can do is completely rest. I mean, they know that now with backs, like people when they've hurt their backs, he's all bed rest for I don't know two weeks. It was crazy, and then the people would get worse, of course, because all the stiffness and tightness. Well, now they know, even with acute injuries, not to do that. We want to use active rest, which means work around the area and stay moving and do things that are good to promote healthy blood flow. That's really what they mean. All right, so that's the principle of recuperation and I think we got it from a hormonal standpoint, a morphological standpoint, a philosophical standpoint. I think we got it down pretty good, personalized this advertisement for them again because during the hurricane a client had an issue with the garage door.
Speaker 1:Literally the next day I reached out to the owner, jeff Hawk, and said, hey, they're having some issues, can you help them out? He got a hold of them that day and I got an update today. They're solving the problem, they're getting some new doors. But he got back to the customer on that Thursday or Friday, whatever the day was after the hurricane. I mean, that's what you want. We don't see that in so many areas of our society anymore. Customer service is kind of going down. So, like, stick with the little guy. You know the little business not that they're little, but you know, let's keep it, let's keep it close to home. Overhead door at Daytona beach is phenomenal. They can be reached at overheaddoordaytonacom. Thank you.
