Optimal Performance and Recovery with Red Light Therapy
In training and athletics, you often hear about “optimizing performance” and improving the recovery process. In this article, we’ll talk about what it actually means to optimize your fitness and recovery. We’ll explain how you can get started, best practices for improving recovery & performance, and explain why recovery is important for everyone (not just athletes). We’ll also break down how and why red light therapy is used by professional trainers and athletes to support peak performance, muscle health, and recovery, and if it's best to use red light therapy before or after workout.
What Does it Mean to Optimize Performance and Recovery?
Optimizing performance and recovery means trying to maximize the effectiveness of your body’s natural healing processes, so you can stay in the best shape possible and enhance your workout or daily activities. It means giving your body the tools and ingredients it needs to do its many jobs as efficiently as possible. On a practical level, optimizing performance requires you to pay close attention to your body, how it functions, as well as training & living in a way that best supports those processes. In other words, how well you perform at the gym is the product of how you live your life: how you train, and how you eat, drink, & sleep—not just how hard you push while lifting weights.
Recovery is one of the Foundations of Physical Performance
Recovery and performance go hand in hand. To improve fitness, it pays to work out consistently. To get bigger, stronger, and faster, you have to gradually push your body to higher levels of performance. For most people, that’s always been the biggest focus of exercise and training. The recovery process—the down time between training sessions—is essential for staying healthy as you work out. Cooling down, resting, and getting good sleep between workouts gives your body time to replenish its energy reserves and heal muscle & tissue damage. Quality recovery time helps you come back from acute soreness and inflammation, so you can perform better. Proper recovery also helps prevent fatigue and injuries, so you can stay healthier over time, avoid chronic problems, and improve longevity. Without prioritizing recovery, it’s almost impossible to maintain peak physical performance. This is why so many athletes and trainers have made recovery a top priority.
Recovery is Important for Everyone, Not Just Athletes
Recovery isn’t just an advantage for athletes, though. Everyone should pay attention to how their body rests and heals in order to give themselves time to recover from strain and inflammation. What works for athletes and trainers can also help professionals, busy parents, or seniors trying to maintain their activity levels. Though you may not train or play sports, most people put big demands on their bodies every day and need to recover to keep performing well. Everyone can benefit from paying closer attention to their health and lifestyle and how it relates to their muscles, inflammation, and recovery.
The Dangers of Not Recovering Properly
Overtraining and pushing your body too hard can severely limit your performance in the short and long term. Whether you’re an athlete or an everyday achiever, your body has limits, and you’ll start to break down and perform worse when you push those limits without letting your body recover. You’re more likely to suffer injuries when you don’t recover, and you can also negatively affect your hormone levels and immune system. You also need to give your body time to process inflammation.
Recovery and Inflammation
When you’ve exerted yourself with a strenuous workout, your body’s natural inflammatory response kicks in. Inflammation is a complex process, essentially your body’s programmed reaction to danger or strain. With exercise, inflammation is a natural response to muscle damage. The term “damage” makes it sound dangerous, but light tissue damage is how muscles grow: microtears from exercise and growth are repaired in order for muscle tissues to get stronger.
The acute inflammation you experience when exercising is part of this normal process of growth and repair. If you don’t recover properly after workouts, or don’t fully heal from an injury or strain, that acute inflammation can become chronic over time and limit your performance. It’s a vicious cycle if your body and cells are out of balance, always trying to recover and heal from injuries while repairing from new damage and strain.
Red Light Therapy Before or After Workout
Today, there’s more focus on recovery than ever before—products, methods, and theories about recovery have never been more prevalent. Ultimately, most of them are no substitute for sound health and fitness fundamentals. If you’re serious about improving your fitness and/or focusing more on your body’s recovery, start with these tried and true strategies:
Listen to Your Body: When you train and compete, it’s important to pay attention to the signals your body is sending. Competitive people who want to improve often overlook these signs and push forward, risking injury and fatigue by doing so. If you’re feeling unusual pain or soreness in a specific area, it’s worth paying attention and giving your body time to address the problem.
Prioritize Sleep: The best thing you can do for your body’s recovery is get good, restful sleep every night. Deep, REM sleep gives your body the time to digest food, process fat, clear out inflammation, and repair damaged tissues. If you’re not getting 7+ hours of good sleep every night, it will be more difficult for your body to come back from pain, strain, fatigue, and injury.
Get the Blood Flowing: Good circulation is essential for proper healing, whether it’s an injury or the inflammation & strain that comes with working out. Red blood cells transported to injuries carry oxygen, which stimulates the creation of new blood vessels and helps to form new skin and tissues at the damaged site. Blood flow is also crucial for the body's natural inflammatory response. When our bodies are injured or infected, the circulatory system transports white blood cells to the site. Part of the inflammatory response includes vascular dilation so blood can flow more rapidly to the problem area. How you sit, how you move, and when you eat (and drink) all impact your blood flow.
Eat Real Food: Like sleep, diet is a pillar of good health, and plays a big role in how well you perform and recover. Supporting your body with a balanced diet of whole foods and a minimum of processed foods is one of the most reliable ways to help your body work better and recover from damage faster.
Optimize Cellular Health and Seek Balance: Your ability to perform and recover comes down to the cells that make up your body. Your body does better, and recovers more effectively, when your cells are creating and using energy efficiently, with as little oxidative stress and inflammation as possible. ATP energy, or adenosine triphosphate, powers everything we do. We make it every day by processing the food we eat or tapping into energy reserves like muscle glycogen. We make ATP through the process of cellular respiration within the mitochondria, which works best when our cells are closest to a state of balance, or homeostasis.
How Red Light Therapy Supports Optimal Performance and Recovery
What is Red Light Therapy? Light therapy is a simple, non-invasive treatment that uses light emitted from LEDs to deliver wavelengths of red and near infrared (NIR) light to the skin and cells. Light therapy promotes more efficient cellular energy synthesis (ATP production), and treatments also help restore the balance of stressed cells and tissues. This can make a big impact on a person’s training and recovery.
Red Light Therapy Before Exercise: You can pre-condition with light therapy before exercise to support stronger muscle performance. Pre-exercise light therapy can also help you limit muscle damage and strain, which can negatively impact performance because of inflammation, soreness, and longer recovery times.
Red Light Therapy After Exercise: You can use light therapy after an exercise session, or after every exercise session as a part of your training routine. The purpose of post-exercise light therapy is to speed the recovery process by accelerating your muscle adaptation to exercise. Light therapy after training also helps the body process acute inflammation from working out.
Conclusion: Use Red Light Therapy Before or After Workout
Optimizing performance and recovery is about giving your body and cells what they need to succeed, from food and water, to healthy light. Recovery is a foundation of health and performance, whether you’re a pro athlete or a weekend warrior. Ignoring recovery can have major consequences, like chronic injuries and strain. To enhance your recovery, focus on your lifestyle and make sure to get good sleep and eat well. For an added boost, Red light therapy treatments support peak physical performance and improved recovery & healing.
