However, it’s not easy to know how to achieve that level of recovery. Beginners often try to rely on muscle soreness as an indicator of both progress and recovery, but it’s actually a poor measure of both. Directly measuring certain enzymes like creatine kinase that are markers for exercise-induced stress are more accurate, but require a precision that’s not practical for most of us in everyday life. Thank goodness for researchers who investigate this stuff for us. A recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning addressed the best way to recover.

In the study, the researchers compared recovery methods of professional rugby players. The players were tested for performance recovery based on a counter-movement jump, which was chosen because of its neurological demand. Neurological recovery is the most elusive kind of recovery to study. The researchers also looked at the creatine kinase activity as a chemical method for determining how recovered the players were from their matches. The researchers even measured the difficulty of each match, since recovery achieved is relative to recovery needed.

Each participant in the study was his own control. Each player used one of three recovery methods after each of three games. All the players did all three routines one at a time in a random order. One method was cold water immersion, or the dreaded ice bath. Another method was contrasting water immersion, which involves switching back and forth between an ice bath and a hot bath. The final method was active recovery. The athletes in this group recovered by cycling on an exercise bike to improve blood flow.

Both the cold water immersion and the contrasting water immersion had better effects on performance, creatine kinase levels, and soreness than active recovery by two days after the games. The contrasting therapy also outperformed cold water alone in creatine kinase and soreness reduction.

One limitation of the study was that the methods used were not randomized, since the facilities used after each game didn’t allow for all methods. This is a restriction in real life, too. For example, a contrasting shower might be more accessible to the average athlete than hot and cold tubs, but a shower might not be as effective as a tub. Indeed, the researchers noted their results in contrasting therapy were different from prior studies in which showers were used.

In the end, as far is as using cold immersion alone or hot and cold tubs together, the answer is that both are obviously effective. If you have access to these methods, then they should be utilized. When it comes to which specific immersion times produce the best results or ways to make more practical methods like showers as effective as tubs, we will need to wait for answers.

References:

1. NP Webb, et. al., “The Relative Efficacy of Three Recovery Modalities After Professional Rugby League Matches,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 27(9), 2013.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Hydrotherapy vs. Active Recovery: Which Is More Effective? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

A recent study published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, looked at three classical recovery methods in seventeen elite male adult swimmers. The testing protocol involved two repetitions of 200m front crawl with 10 minutes of recovery time, with evaluation of recovery measured as clearance of serum lactate, as well as repeated performance time. The recovery methods tested in this study were massage, active recovery, and passive recovery.

The study revealed that all three recovery methods resulted in a significant decrease in blood lactate, however there was a significant difference in the levels of blood lactate clearance between them. A significant difference in performance time was also observed after all three recovery methods; however no significant difference was noted in performance time between active recovery and massage.

This study concluded that in the testing conditions used for this swim test set, active recovery was the most efficient method at clearing blood lactate, followed by massage, and finally passive recovery, while all being effective at clearing blood lactate. Further, it concluded that both active recovery and massage were equally effective at improving performance time post-recovery, while being more effective than passive recovery.

So the take home message from this study could possibly be that for swimming, an ideal mode of recovery would include both active recovery and massage for improved lactate clearance and performance time. USA Swimming already recommends active recovery for their swimmers (also referred to as cool down period, it is variable depending on the age of swimmer and the distance raced).

But swimming itself could lend itself useful as a recovery methodology of active recovery. Another study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at the performance of nine top triathletes. The athletes performed an interval run of 8 x 3 minutes at 85% to 90% of VO2 peak velocity on two separate occasions. Ten hours after the run, they either swam 2,000 meters or laid down for an equal amount of time. Fourteen hours after that, the subjects performed a high-intensity run to fatigue to assess how well their running performance had recovered from the previous day’s interval sessions.

The results showed the athletes had an improvement of 14% in their run time to fatigue after swimming for recovery compared to lying still (13:50 versus 12:08) concomitant with a decrease in the levels of c-reactive protein, a biomarker for inflammation. This suggests that swimming for recovery enhanced subsequent run performance by attenuating tissue inflammation caused by initial exertion, as well as benefitting from the hydrostatic properties of water. Interestingly the study also found there was no significant different in the perceived recovery between the two test groups while clearly showing differences in performance.

It would be plausible to infer that using swimming as an active recovery method is the way to go for swimmers, triathletes, and potentially runners based on the studies mentioned. For triathletes this information can be useful in planning training sessions, by including their swims on days after running. But could this recovery method also be applied to other sports? Many sports partially rely on running for improved performance: soccer, football, rugby, and CrossFit, to name a few. But if in the latter study recovery swimming improved performance due to attenuation of tissue inflammation, it is possible that recovery swimming could universally apply to any sport that causes tissue inflammation upon exertion (possibly 80-90% of sports) and not just running.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Swimming May Be the Best Method of Recovery for All Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.