Video:What Is Active Recovery?

Transcript:What Is Active Recovery?

Hi I'm author, speaker and trainer JJ Flizanes of JJFlizanes.com.  I'm here on behalf of About.com today to talk to you about active recovery, what it is, and why it's important.

Definition of Active Recovery

So what is active recovery?  Active recovery is like a cool down, except that it can be used in all types of exercise.  Why is it important? Active recovery is important because it improves your circulation, it actually can improve the recovery of your muscles and it can decrease muscle soreness.

Examples of Active Recovery

Let me give you some examples of using active recovery. So after running a race or a sprint or doing something very intense in a running or jogging situation, most of us are inclined to naturally want to walk afterwards, which is absolutely the best kind of active recovery you can do after running because it improves your circulation, it increases your active range of motion in the muscles you just used which is going to help to increase the rate of recovery for those muscles and decrease any kind of muscle soreness.

Active Recovery When Swimming

Another example would be in the pool. If you were swimming and doing laps. Treading water after those laps would be a form of active recovery.  If you are doing lifting, heavy lifting either in the gym or lets say you're helping a friend move and you're lifting boxes with your upper body, or you're boxing. Any type of upper body motion, an active recovery would just be doing active stretching using your arms and your muscles, the ones you just used, in all aspects of the range of motion for each joint.  This would again improve circulation, decrease muscle soreness, and speed up recovery of those muscles.

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