32 Tips to Improve Your Health and Fitness
#22. Recovery
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When we recover better from our workouts and the stress of our daily lives we feel better, we think better, and our bodies are better able to perform optimally.⠀
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Recovery is holistic: we need to sleep, eat healthy, drink water, and workout to reduce our stress. Here are 5 Tips to help you recover better so you live as your best, healthiest, full functioning self!⠀
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Tip # 1: Get 8 Hours of sleep each night. During deep sleep our bodies secrete testosterone, and growth hormone. These anabolic hormones allow us to recover, changes our cognition, affects our decision making abilities, aids in memory consolidation, helps motor skills sink in, and reduces inflammation.⠀
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Tip # 2: Get more sun! Lack of sun exposure leads to lack of vitamin D3, which we need to make 5-HTP into Serotonin, Serotonin becomes Melatonin, and Melatonin helps turn off our adrenals so we can get good sleep!⠀
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When we are Vitamin D3 deficient, we are serotonin deficient (which makes us moody), we are melatonin deficient (which causes sleep issues), and we get all of the problems associated with sleep issues.⠀
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Tip # 3: Reduce Alcohol consumption. Alcohol essentially spikes our cortisol, and, similar to taking a sleep drug, we don’t enter into deep sleep and lose all of the benefits and adaptations that happen during deep sleep.⠀
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Tip # 4: Workout to help you sleep better. The right amount of training can increase your sleep pressure—our drive to want to go to sleep. And the higher the sleep pressure, the better quality of sleep we get.⠀
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Tip # 5: Track your Data. Services like the Whoop Watch have data tracking and analysis to help you track things like your sleep (total time in bed, deep sleep cycles, etc.), and your Heart Rate Variability indicating that our nervous system is balanced, and that our body is very capable of adapting to its environment and performing at its best.
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When we recover well we improve how our body functions, so we feel better, we move better, we continue to get healthy and fit. We can start with getting good sleep to recover better, and look at our lives holistically to improve our recovery so we can live optimally.