Why Specialize in Exercise Recovery as a Personal Trainer?

Recovery is essential to making gains when you workout. If you’re a trainer or an exercise enthusiast, you probably already know this.

For trainers, the benefits of workout recovery are obvious. They’re not always obvious to your clients, though. Even experienced athletes sometimes overdo it and neglect vital recovery times.

Learn more about recovery, what it means, why it’s important, and why you should seriously consider earning this specialization for your training business.

Learn more about what fitness specializations are and why trainers need them.

What is Recovery?

Exercise creates tiny tears in muscle tissue. This damage repairs during recovery periods, building up stronger muscle tissue. If you never take a break from working out, your body can’t do the important work of repairing the damage.

Rest vs. Recovery

Recovery and rest are not always the same thing. Rest is generally considered to be a break from exercise and physical activity. A rest day, for instance, would be a day you do nothing more strenuous than light chores around the house.

Recovery is a more focused approach to healing the body after exercise. It can take many different forms, from total rest to light activities. There are many different strategies for recovery, including nutrition, changing up exercises, massage, and more high-tech solutions like electrical stimulation.

Short Term vs. Long Term Recovery

Immediate, or short term recovery is what you do in the hours, or a day, after exercising. This recovery process usually includes resting, cooling down, refueling, and rehydrating.

Long-term recovery is a plan that extends to days and weeks. It may include a rest day, a day with light exercise, or even week-long periods of rest or lower-intensity workouts.

Passive vs. Active Recovery

Rest is passive recovery. This means being inactive. A true rest day is when you remain largely sedentary and don’t even perform any light exercises.

There is a time and place for passive recovery, such as after an injury. However, most experts recognize the greater benefits of active recovery. This is when you engage in light activity. It could be a walk, a gentle cycle, or a yoga class, for instance.

Why Specialize in Exercise Recovery as a Trainer?

Recovery has not always gotten a lot of attention. Through sports science research, fitness experts have come to understand just how important recovery is for everyone from professional athletes to casual gym-goers.

If you can offer personal training clients expertise in recovery, you can get them better results, prevent injuries and pain, and educate them about all the benefits of this important period between workouts.

It’s When Your Clients Get the Benefits of Exercise

While the workout is the difficult, challenging part, recovery is when you reap the rewards. This is when your body works on muscle repair and adapts to the stress you put on it during a tough workout.

In order to make those adaptations and to rebuild muscle tissue to be stronger, the body must have rest and recovery. Working out without taking time to recover can be dangerous. At best, it stalls fitness goals and leads to poor or no results.

If you really want to take clients to the next level and help them hit their fitness, weight, and strength goals, they need recovery. To make the most of this essential element of fitness, it helps to have a specialization.

When you get better results for your clients, you grow as a fitness professional. Those satisfied clients will recommend you to friends, and your business will grow.

Clients Don’t Always Understand Recovery

Maybe some do, and many think they do, but with a specialization in exercise recovery, you can teach your clients a lot. For instance, a lot of people still think a rest day means doing nothing. Research is clear that recovery should mostly be active.

Active recovery, according to research, has several benefits:

• It reduces the buildup of lactic acid in muscles.

• It increases blood flow to muscles, which aids repair.

• It helps remove metabolic waste products

• It reduces tears in muscle tissue and resulting pain. (3)

Research also indicates there is a time and place for passive recovery and rest. Do your clients know the difference and when to engage in each type of recovery?

Overtraining Leads to Injury

Many people are susceptible to overtraining. It’s great to have drive and motivation to meet athletic or fitness goals but overdoing it can lead to pain and injuries. Your clients will benefit from having a recovery expert guiding their workouts and their rest periods for maximum results with minimal injuries.

A lot of people don’t even realize they’re overtraining until they have experienced the bad effects. Many people ignore rest and recovery until they’re in pain or injured. A proactive approach to recovery is necessary, but one that too many avoid.

Your clients need you to be an expert in recovery in order to identify when they need rest. It’s not always easy to know what you need, but an expert observing your progress can identify the tell-tale signs of overtraining: fatigue, decreases in performance, aches and pains, and a bad mood.

Nutrition is Often Overlooked in Recovery

You’ll learn from a certification in exercise recovery that nutrition is also important for maximizing gains and meeting goals. A course will teach you how to refuel and rehydrate, soon after workouts and on rest and recovery days.

Choosing the right macronutrient ratios, healthy foods, and, in some cases, supplements make a big difference to recovery. Your clients need your expertise to make the most of post-workout and rest-day nutrition.

Learn more about supplements that aid recovery here.

Recovery is Not One-Size-Fits-All

Even if your clients are knowledgeable about fitness and recovery, they need someone with expertise to individualize a recovery plan. Research suggests that exercise recovery is not as simple as giving the same plan to everyone. It is not one-size-fits-all. (2)

Athletes and trainers have long known that personal training schedules and plans need to be tailored to each individual. Less attention has been given to individualizing recovery, but it’s important.

For instance, some people need more sleep than others to recover. You may have a vegan client who needs more guidance on getting adequate protein. A client training for a marathon needs a different recovery strategy than someone only working out to lose ten pounds.

An exercise recovery specialist program will teach you how to tailor recovery to each client, even using DNA information if your clients have been through a DNA lifestyle test.

Learn more: Common Muscle Recovery Tools - Do You Need Them?

Why Specialize in Exercise Recovery if I’m Already a Certified Personal Trainer?

Holding a personal trainer certification provides a solid foundation of knowledge and skills to do this job. However, there are so many areas of specialty in fitness that a basic course can’t possibly cover them all in significant detail.

Yes, as a certified personal trainer, you know something about recovery. You understand its importance and can help clients with it. But do you know all the recovery strategies, and which are best? Do you know how to direct specific clients with unique needs to the appropriate recovery technique? Do you understand the role of food and supplements in recovery?

With a specialization, you’ll gain many more valuable skills and be able to better serve your clients. Recovery is an entire fitness discipline unto itself. To offer this service to clients, you need to be a true specialist.

Recovery has always been important to making fitness gains and staying healthy. The difference today is that more people are aware of it. As your clients strive for new goals, be prepared to support them with the best recovery advice and guidance.

Become an ISSA Exercise Recovery Specialist

As more clients become aware of the importance of proper recovery, many will want expert advice. Add recovery expertise to your list of services with ISSA’s Exercise Recovery Specialist program. Learn online and expand your fitness career.

References

1. Dupuy, O., Douzi, W., Theurot, D., Bosquet, L., & Dugué, B. (2018). 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. Frontiers in Physiology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.00403

2. Minett, G. M., & Costello, J. T. (2015). Specificity and context in post-exercise recovery: It is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Frontiers in Physiology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2015.00130