2266 WWAAYYSS TTOO RREECCOOVVEERR WWIITTHH LLIIGGHHTTNNIINNGG SSPPEEEEDD I'll admit it. I used to be pretty old-school and simple with recovery. A post-workout shake or smoothie. Maybe a little stretching or foam roller. And if things got really bad, a bit of ice massage or a cold bath. Heck, there's absolutely nothing wrong with simplicity. After all, you can easily get carried away spending so much time playing with new gadgets, toys and recovery tools that you forget about simply enjoying a glass of wine while gazing into the sunset at the end of a long day or a tough run. But at the same time, I remember back to the days when I shared an office (for three years) with a sports medicine physician. All day long, marathoners, triathletes, cyclists and weekend warriors would come through the medical clinic door complaining of chronic aches, pains and injuries that they'd been fighting for weeks, months and even years. However, with just a few of the simple recovery tips or home recovery gear you'll discover in this chapter, these folks could have easily saved themselves expensive doctor's office visits, surgeries, missed workouts, cancelled races, pain and frustration. So I would be remiss not to equip you with every possible technique I've studied to keep the body in pristine shape, especially if you're laying down some serious damage by going above and beyond the status of "weekend warrior". Heck, as I write this chapter I am actually sitting on my couch after a tough bike ride, with an electrostimulation unit called a Compex and a frozen icing application called FrozenPeaz on my knees. This isn't because I'm injured. I simply want my joints to last longer, so I consider this type of recovery hack to just be better living through science. And in this chapter I’m giving you 26 of my top techniques to recover from your workouts with lightning speed. Sure, I've mentioned some of these gear, food, supplementation and underground recovery techniques before, but never aggregated all of them into one mighty blog post that will have you bouncing back from workouts, races, events and injuries as fast as possible. --------------------------------- The Best Recovery Techniques 1. Acupuncture So why not jump off the deep end right away and start talking about scary needles, eh? I'll admit that it may seem inconvenient, odd and a bit excessive to include acupuncture as a convenient or do-able recovery method, but as a coach and athlete, I've found the occasional acupuncture session to be an incredibly useful method for everything from nagging aches and pains to full- blown adrenal fatigue. There's no need to duck down back allies to find some fringe Chinese medical clinic - and in the USA, you'll find that the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM) is chock full of licensed acupuncturists operating out of pristine medical clinics. Acupuncture is relatively painless, and simply involves stimulating certain points on the body using a variety of techniques - with the most common being penetrating the skin with super-fine needles (which are then manipulated manually or by electrical stimulation). As one of the oldest healing practices in the world, acupuncture has been proven to help in recovery from muscular fatigue(19), recovery from overtraining and adrenal fatigue(39), management of muscle pain (12), and many of the common issues faced by physically active or overtrained people. I've personally used an acupuncturist to fix IT band friction syndrome and nagging hip pain. For more on acupuncture, and an interview with the guy I personally use for my acupuncture, you should listen to the podcast episode "Exactly What To Expect If You Try Acupuncture". But let's say you have an aversion to needles. Or you don't have time to drive around hunting down an acupuncturist. Later in this chapter, I'll tell you about PEMF, which is a non- invasive optimal alternative to acupuncture. It's been proven in research (17) to work similarly to acupuncture, and may be a good solution if you don't like poky things, or you simply want something similar to acupuncture that you can use in a home setting. 2. Stem Cell Therapy Yes, I'm sticking to the fringe stuff early in this chapter - and stem cell therapy certainly is another potent recovery method that flies under the radar. Traditional, injectable stem cell therapy would be something you'd reserve as a last-ditch effort to avoid, say, a hip or knee replacement, or as a final attempt to fix a joint before giving up running, lifting, cycling, etc. and taking up foosball as your new sport. But if you are desperate, stem cells have incredible healing abilities and can be transformed into neurons, muscle, and several different types of connective tissue - allowing for rapid joint "regeneration". In the US, companies like RecyteCorp are on the cutting edge of developing injectable stem cell treatments to manage everything from regrowing spinal chord cells to erasing cartilage pain. If stem cells offend your ethical values about how embryos should be used, then there's no need to fret. Contrary to popular belief, stem cells can be harvested from sources other than human embryos, such as body fat and bone marrow (16). Clinics such as the Institute of Regenerative Medicine and Orthopedics actually offer stem cells from these alternate regions for injections into injuries that need to be healed fast, or chronic aches and pains that need a permanent fix. But at this point, an embryonic stem cell injection therapy session is going to require a jaunt to Europe or Asia, where those type of stem cell injections are more common. But if harvesting and re-injecting your own or somebody else's stem cells doesn't seem like a logistical or financially feasible option for you, there are alternate ways to upregulate your own internal stem call activity. One of my personal physician advisors, Dr. David Minkoff (who has himself completed 40 Ironman triathlons), recently made me aware of the fact that you don't necessarily have to get fancy or expensive injections to take advantage of your body's ability to use stem cells for fast recuperation. In his Lifeworks Wellness Center medical clinic in Florida, he prescribes a supplement called Celergen, which is based on what they call a "biological DNA extraction technology", which works very similarly to stem cell therapy, without the injections. Celergen is comprised of a cellular marine complex and peptide collagens - two compounds very popular in the anti-aging community, but componds that can also be used to enhance recovery in active individuals (you'll increasingly find that what is "old news" in the anti-aging community is going to become more and more popular for recovering or injured athletes). Another cellular compound that also acts similarly to stem cell therapy is marine phytoplankton, a green, gooey liquid that you can suck sublingually from a dropper bottle. The idea behind marine cells is that they contain the proper ratios of amino acids, enzymes, fatty acids, minerals and pigments to allow your body to rapidly generate new stem cells. Reaserch is still a bit scant on phytoplankton, but I currently have a couple bottles in my refrigerator (and they literally do taste what you would imagine liquid algae to taste like). 3. Cryotherapy Cryotherapy is a recovery method I personally use nearly every day (in the form of morning and evening cold showers, and many, many cold soaks in the bathtub or river). In Chapter 4 of this book, you learned all about the advantages of cold thermogenesis, including the multitude of performance benefits derived from frequent exposure to cold temperature such as cold water immersion, cold showers, cold-hot contrast showers, or use of body cooling gear such as the Cool Fat Burner vest or 110% Compression Gear. The benefits of all these forms of "cryotherapy" include enhanced immune system, increased cell longevity, decreased level of inflammatory molecules such interleukin-6, and of course, an incredible tolerance to be able to run outside and do snow angels in your underwear (8). But what about simply icing a sore muscle or joint? The application of cold to an injured area is hardly a new concept. The Greek physician Hippocrates wrote about the use of cold therapy to control pain and swelling in the 4th century B.C., and the Roman physician Galen described the use of cold compresses for analgesia following soft tissue injuries in the 1st century A.D. During the Middle Ages, ice was used for pre- surgical anesthesia, and ice therapy has been extensively used in the athletic training and physical therapy for the treatment of sports injuries for many years. But despite the seeming widespread acceptance of tossing a bag of ice on an injured ankle or aching shoulder, there seems to be a doubting of icing’s efficacy across the internet and in several magazines. The argument goes something like this: when an injury occurs, your body creates inflammation as a healing response. So if inflammation is the body’s natural way to heal an injury, why would you want to block this inflammatory process with ice? Furthermore, it is claimed that icing may increase the permeability of lymphatic vessels (tubes which normally help carry excess tissue fluids back into the cardiovascular system). Once this lymphatic permeability increases, there may be risk of a large amounts of fluid backflowing into the injured area, causing more swelling than may have occurred if you didn’t ice in the first place.