What helps muscles recover faster

Why you get sore after sports or a workout

What your muscles need to help recover faster

Understanding why you get pain and a reduction in performance, the goal of any recovery method should include:

• helping the microscopic damage heal
• help remove the metabolic wastes and break down products
• help relieve the tension off the muscles

Lets look at what you need to do to help this.

The basic things you need to do to help your muscles recover faster

1. Warmup and preparation
2. Adequate rest, sleep, hydration and nutrition

Warmup and preparation

Before sport or strenuous exercise is advisable to warm up properly using light exercises and stretching. This helps prepare your muscles for exertion and will reduce the risk of injury

Sleep and rest

Your muscles need adequate sleep and rest to recover.

Diet and hydration

There are a lot of recommendations with regard to hydration and dietary supplements. We don’t claim expertise in relation to dietary supplementation, but these and hydration need to be considered from the principle of homeostasis. This is your body’s inbuilt mechanisms to maintain it’s environment. Lets look at how this relates to fluid levels and a dietary example.

Homeostasis and fluid levels

Your body will do it’s best to maintain optimal fluid levels. If you drink too much the excess will be expelled by your kidneys. If you don’t have enough your body will attempt to conserve fluids, but the dehydrated state will likely detriment your body’s ability to flush the wastes from the healing muscles and bring in fresh nutrients. What this means is you should dehydrate after exercise with more fluids than you’ve lost, and drink a few extra glasses of water during the day.

Homeostasis and proteins

Protein supplements are often recommended during recovery, but your body’s homeostasis mechanisms regulate these too. The basic building blocks of protein are amino acids. If your body has too much of an amino acid it just breaks them down, salvaging the usable parts and expelling the rest. As stated before, we are not experts in supplements so taking some may result in a beneficial short term increase, but by basic homeostasis principles as long as your diet has adequate amounts of proteins, vitamins, minerals and so forth it will keep and use what it needs and get rid of the rest.

The therapies you can use to help your muscles recover

The best therapies

• Manual massage performed by a professional therapist
• Vibration massage

Vibration massage

Like manual massage, vibration massage is also shown to give very worthwhile reductions in pain and to speed recovery (1,5–13) . Science shows that vibration massage relaxes muscles and increases blood flow, plus in addition it has some quite remarkable additional effects.

• Speeding the growth of muscle fibres
• reducing the amount of scar tissue formed
• causes and increase in the body’s production of growth hormones

For more details on these effects please see our article The scientifically proven effects of vibration massage- with clinical applications.

Therapies with marginal benefits

• Cold/ice
• Contrast baths
• Compression garments
• Active recovery

Cold/Ice therapy

Cold/Ice therapy is cooling the body down after exercise, such as using an ice bath. It is said to reduce swelling and inflammation. Clinical trials have only shown that this therapy gives a small and inconsistent reduction in post exercise soreness (2–4,14)⁠.

Contrast (hot/cold) baths

Contrast baths involve alternating between hot and cold baths. Clinical trials have shown these to produce a small decrease in post exercise pain (3)⁠. It is a fundamental principle of physics that things expand and contract with changes of temperature, so contrast baths would produce some sort of pumping action in the fluids in the muscles. However, it is hard to imagine this effect to be anywhere near that of the increased blood flow caused by manual or vibration massage.

Compression garments

Compression garments are garments that exert pressure on the muscles. They are presumed to cause a reduction in swelling. Clinical trials show that these garments can give a small decrease in post exercise pain (3)⁠.

Active recovery

Active recovery is the use of light or moderate exercise during the recovery phase. If we refer back to the cause of post exercise soreness and the needs for recovery we see that such exercise could have both positive and negative effects.

Positive effects of active recovery

• help stretch and relax muscles
• help stimulate blood flow

Negative effects of active recovery

• can damage healing muscle fibres

Because of this clinical trials have only shown inconsistent short term pain relief (3,4,14–16)⁠. However, active recovery is easy to do, and if done conservatively to minimize potential damage it is probably very worthwhile.

Therapies with no proven benefits

Electrotherapies

I’m not sure what these are trying to achieve, but clinical trials say they don’t help (16)⁠

Summary and recommendation

The following are our simple guidelines to reduce post exercise soreness and speed recovery. Keep in mind that this is for general information only. For specific advice consult a professional familiar with your own needs.

Warmup and preparation

Before sport or strenuous exercise is advisable to warm up properly using light exercises and stretching. This helps prepare your muscles for exertion and will reduce the risk of injury

Massage or vibration massage

These therapies have proved to be beneficial when done before exercise, after exercise, and during the recovery phase. An effective program may be to use either therapy before, after and each day during recovery. A professional sports person with therapy provided will probably have this done by professional massage therapists. However, for most this will need to be self applied. As discussed, the use of foam rollers and percussion massagers (massage guns) is not that effective, so the best alternative is to use a good vibration massager. We have a lot of information about this elsewhere on our website, but the following would be a great place to start.

Video: How to choose a massager
Article: Percussion vs vibration massage
How to use your massager: Instructions page
Video: Our very effective vibration massager

Active recovery

As discussed above, active recovery has potential positive effects and detriment. We recommend that light exercise be done conservatively to minimise the risk of injuring healing muscle fibres.

Sleep, rest, hydration and diet

• Make sure you get adequate sleep and rest
• After exercise drink more than enough to replace fluids lost, and supplement with several glasses of water each day
• Make sure you have an adequate diet. Supplements may provide some advantage, but the principles of homeostasis tell us that your body will get rid of any excesses it doesn’t need, so there is the potential for supplements to be converted to very expensive urine.

References

1. Imtiyaz S, Veqar Z, Shareef MY. To compare the effect of vibration therapy and massage in prevention of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). J Clin Diagnostic Res. 2014;
2. Naderi A, Aminian-Far A, Gholami F, Mousavi SH, Saghari M, Howatson G. Massage enhances recovery following exercise-induced muscle damage in older adults. Scand J Med Sci Sport. 2021;31(3):623–32.
3. Dupuy O, Douzi W, Theurot D, Bosquet L, Dugué B. An Evidence-Based Approach for Choosing Post-exercise Recovery Techniques to Reduce Markers of Muscle Damage, Soreness, Fatigue, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis. Front Physiol. 2018;9(APR):1–15.
4. Bishop PA, Jones E, Woods AK. Recovery from training: A brief review. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2008.
5. Ntshangase S, Peters-Futre E. The efficacy of manual versus local vibratory massage in promoting recovery from post-exercise muscle damage – A systematic review. J Sci Med Sport. 2017;20(February):e42.
6. Veqar Z, Imtiyaz S. Vibration therapy in management of delayed onset muscle soreness. J Clin Diagnostic Res. 2014;8(6):10–3.
7. Lau WY, Nosaka K. Effect of vibration treatment on symptoms associated with eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage. Am J Phys Med Rehabil. 2011;
8. Bakhtiary AH, Safavi-Farokhi Z, Aminian-Far A. Influence of vibration on delayed onset of muscle soreness following eccentric exercise. Br J Sports Med. 2007;
9. von Stengel S, Teschler M, Weissenfels A, Willert S, Kemmler W. Effect of deep oscillation as a recovery method after fatiguing soccer training: A randomized cross-over study. J Exerc Sci Fit. 2018;16(3):112–7.
10. Timon R. Effects of whole-body vibration after eccentric exercise on muscle soreness and muscle strength recovery. J Phys Ther Sci. 2016;28:1781–5.
11. Kamandani R, Ghazalian F, Ebrahim K, Ghassembaglou N, Shiri Piraghaj M, Khorram A. The Effect of Acute Vibration Training on Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness in Young Non-Athlete Women. Heal Scope. 2015;2(3):119–24.
12. Lu X, Wang Y, Lu J, You Y, Zhang L, Zhu D. Does vibration benefit delayed-onset muscle soreness ?: a meta-analysis and systematic review. 2019;
13. Koeda T. A trial to evaluate experimentally induced delayed onset muscle soreness and its modulation by vibration. Environ Med. 2003;47:26–30.
14. Kinugasa T, Kilding AE. A comparison of post-match recovery strategies in youth soccer players. J Strength Cond Res. 2009;23(5):1402–7.
15. Toubekis AG, Smilios I, Bogdanis GC, Mavridis G, Tokmakidis SP. Effect of different intensities of active recovery on sprint swimming performance. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2006;31(6):709–16.
16. Cortis C. Effects of post-exercise recovery interventions on physiological, psychological and performance parameters. Int J Sports Med. 2010;31:327–35.