Tight and achy muscles are no laughing matter. Whether you’ve just ticked off a high-intensity workout, nailed your strength training program for the week, or you’ve been out on an endurance run, helping your body recover after exercise is always a must — especially if you want to ease a serious case of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
The good news is that there are many things you can do to help your body recover after exercise and ease the stiffness and discomfort you might be experiencing. For example, hot water immersion could be a game-changer for your recovery. The same could be said for pummelling yourself with one of the best massage guns. But there’s another thing to add to the list, and that’s completing a short stretching or mobility routine like this 10-minute active recovery workout from fitness trainer Lindsey Bomgren, the founder of Nourish Move Love.
“Active recovery days are just as important as your heavy strength days,” Bomgren says. “So let’s do our body a favor and stretch it out for the next ten minutes,” she adds.
Watch how to do Lindsey Bomgren’s 10-minute active recovery workout
While you won’t need any weights or resistance bands to complete this session, you will need a grippy yoga mat or exercise mat to provide some extra support underneath your feet.
The session has been organized into a dynamic flow and features nine standing active recovery exercises. The idea is that you complete each exercise for 40 seconds before flowing directly onto the next move.
The nine moves include:
- Good mornings
- Calf raise + tib raise
- Wide shoulder squat drops
- Lateral squat + T-spine rotation
- Standing quad stretch + hinge
- Standing T-spine + shoulder CARS
- Standing internal + standing external hip rotations right
- Standing figure 4
- Standing internal + standing external hip rotations left
- Standing cat-cow
Along with demonstrating each move, Bromgren talks you through how to ace your form. So if you’re in a gym setting or shared space, it’s well worth popping on a pair of the best workout headphones so you can listen in on how to hone each move.
To get the most out of the 10 minutes, Bromgren includes a mix of supersets. This workout technique pairs two exercises back-to-back with little to no rest in between. The benefits of doing so are that it will help you keep your heart rate up, save time in between sets and make your workout more efficient. So you can essentially get more done in less time.
Another brilliant thing about this workout is that the moves included in Bromgren’s session encourage you to train in all three planes of motion. In the workout world, this phrase refers to the multidirectional movement patterns you can take your body through, while moving through the sagittal, frontal, and transverse planes.
“Life is three-dimensional,” Bromgren says. “We move in all planes, so we need to train in all planes and work that range of motion,” she adds.
So not only will this active recovery workout encourage you to move your joints forward and backwards, and side-to-side. It will also take your body through rotations, flexion and extension.
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