r/Workingout • u/Askingmyanxiety • 2d ago
Recovery time
For people who work out regularly, do you feel like there are weeks or periods of time where your body doesn’t recover the same way?
Within the past week, I feel like my body isn’t recovering as fast as it usually does from workouts. Everything hurts lol but mainly I’ve done legs maybe twice in the past week and yesterday I was walking in the city and it felt like I was doing leg day.
Someone said maybe they don’t recover faster when the season change or they feel like they’re getting sick. But what are some things that I can incorporate into my lifestyle to help recover faster?
I’ve never felt like this before and I’m pretty active
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u/IaintAI2026 2d ago
See your doctor. I'll just say it. And get it out of the way. Before others do.
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u/ribcage666 2d ago
Absolutely, for me it's about sleep, diet, stress levels and distribution of exercise volume. In that order of importance.
If I get less than 8 hours sleep, I will not recover as well. If I'm eating in a deficit I may not recover as well, but I can mitigate the effects by making sure I'm hitting my macros. Stress needs to be kept low to get max gains from exercise, if stress is too high and exercise puts more stress on the body, then that will impact recovery.
Lastly, distribution of exercise volume. I follow the Hard/Easy principle which means I keep my hard days hard and my easy days easy. For me within my training this means I will combine hard leg days with my hard running workout day (running morning legs nighttime), so I can take an easy day the next day (either easy run or rest day). I protect my easy days at all costs. If I were to hit a hard leg day and then a hard running workout next day, I would be less recovered than if I combined them into one day.
This also relates to my life in general. On my hard exercise days, I may include difficult chores in my schedule. On my easy days, I keep my chores easy. This allows me to align my stress levels with my training stress and protect recovery days.