Whether you’re a competitive athlete or committed exerciser, at some point you’ve probably experienced excessive fatigue and muscle soreness following your workout. Sometimes this tiredness can hold you back from working out as hard as you’d like for many days.  In order to reduce this feeling of delayed recovery and allow your body to get back into the game sooner than later, you need to appreciate the importance of proper post workout nutrition.

Research scientists have shown that proper nutrition supplementation is critical for recovery from intense weight-training and endurance exercise. Most recently, the evidence points to a specific combination of carbohydrates and protein as being the most effective for restoring muscle glycogen (the fuel you use while exercising), repairing muscle damage, preventing muscle breakdown, and promoting muscle growth.  All of these factors are important for your timely return to your workout plan.

More here.

Building muscle in 30 minutes a day

Today's a day to relax. Or at least learn about it.

A critical component of any exercise program is recovery. It's just as important as exercise and nutrition. In fact, if you don't give your body enough time to rest and recover from the strenuous workouts you do, no matter what you do otherwise, your muscle gains will be minimal, if even positive.

Yeah, you could lose size even if you train right and eat right.

It's a sad fact. But it's true. I've seen super athletes fall from grace by partying too hard into the early morning. I've also been plagued myself by a significant lack of sleep for extended periods of time (years, decades even). I always rationalized my poor sleeping habits with a mucho macho phrase:

I can sleep all I want when I die.

Of course, this thinking is all crap. There's nothing good to be said about sleep deprivation. So let's lay it on the line right now: Get at least 8 hours of sound, restful sleep every single night. Here are a few other "Rules of Recovery" -

• Go to sleep at the same time each night.
• Avoid shift work if at all possible.
• If you must consume caffeine, do so only prior to 3PM.
• Rise at the same time each morning.

Try to abstain from these activities -

• Going to sleep full.
• Exercising immediately before going to bed.
• Consuming any caffeine after about 3PM.
• Taking any kind of weight-loss aids, like diet pills, as they contain caffeine and other stimulants.

Read more about sleep here.

Sleep isn't the only component of Recovery.

You also need to calm down and relax. If you want to build maximum muscle, you need to put your mind at ease and stop worrying about stuff. I used to be a worrier; it's a trait I got from my mom, who constantly worries about this, that, and the other thing. Fortunately, I have overcome this unfortunate mental characteristic. It's a long road, but it's certainly worth it.

Sit if you can stand, walk if you can run. That sort of thing. Conserve as much energy as possible throughout the day. You will find that you won't have to eat as much to get results, either.

It's really win-win.

There's more on Rest here.

If you follow the advice given in this series, you will most definitely be training and eating right. If you find that you still aren't gaining the muscle you think you ought to be gaining, look first at your recovery practices.

• Are you getting enough sleep?
• Do you fidget while working or watching TV?
• Do your ears ring (classic sign of overtraining)?
• Is something bugging you and making you sleep less soundly, for less time, or both?

That's it for this series. I hope you liked it – let me know in the Comments! Thanks for visiting.

To recap, this is the entire series, How to Build Muscle in 30 Minutes a Day:

• Monday – Basic Training
  
• Tuesday – Advanced Training
• Wednesday – Basic Nutrition
• Thursday – Advanced Nutrition & Supplementation
• Friday – Importance of Recovery

Meditation: Give It a Rest
Guest Post by Margaret Fletcher

(Bill's note: Margaret is a long-time friend of mine who is an ace at getting massive amounts of work done in the most efficient and effective ways I've ever seen. She is a true expert in her field and you would be well-served to spend some time at her site studying her methods.)

My friend Bill asked me to put some ideas together for all of you in his community, from the perspective of my way of life. I’m a meditation teacher. Nice to meet you!

Knowing very little about you all, I’ve spent some time contemplating what I might be able to offer that would be of use to you. I imagine a population of people who have high discipline and focus on a specific goal, that of optimizing the physical body.

My own exploration intercepts quite well with that, but I come at things from a different angle. What I’m interested in is optimizing life. That may sound like a ridiculously general goal, and I sense that it is unusually general. Nevertheless, it’s my highest value, it covers everything I do, and I spend the same amount of attention and effort to achieve this goal that I imagine some of you do. And part of this effort, it is very clear to me, must be to engage intimately with the physical body in order to determine how to live optimally in this vehicle we travel around in. So with that said, I think I actually could say a few useful things.

To start, meditation practice is about getting very clear about what’s happening. When you can do this well, you can then take the wisest action available in a given situation. Really knowing what’s happening can include knowing better the conditions around you, and also knowing your own reactions to those conditions, knowing how your body and gut and mind respond and react to various stimuli. Knowing these things, and recognizing what works and what really doesn’t, this is the key to a meditation practice that’s helping you be the person you want to be.

You are surely an expert at this kind of knowing in some places in your life. For example, you may know exactly what happens to a particular muscle when you perform a particular exercise X times per day, and also know what happens when you drop that exercise.  You have perhaps been through the cycle of waxing and waning discipline, and seen what that does to achieving what you’re looking for in your body-building practice. What you may not know about are the subtle and not-so-subtle things that are interfering or supporting your practice. If you could sort out all the bits that interfere and avoid those, and identify all the bits that support and do more of those, can you consider the places you could take your practice and yourself?

Meditation practice can open the field of your disciplined effort to include all aspects of your being. Bill tells me that the three pillars of practice for body optimization are diet, exercise and recovery. The practices of meditation can play an important role in each of these areas. Let’s look at recovery this time. Recovery happens when you give everything a well-deserved rest, yes?

Americans are chronically under-rested. I say this as an expert from the field of meditation. Whenever I am with people who are undertaking a prolonged period of meditation, one of the phenomena people most often report about is falling asleep during meditation. And it doesn’t matter whether “prolonged” is 20 minutes for a beginning meditator, or 5 days for someone first undertaking a silent retreat. People are tired. This comes as a big surprise to such people, but it comes as no surprise to me. Our culture does not value high quality rest time. Ask yourself the following questions, and see how many you can honestly say yes to:

• Do you know to take regular breaks from focused work, and do you actually take them?
• Do you awaken in the morning spontaneously, rather than by an alarm dragging you from sleep?
• Do you avoid multi-tasking and distracting yourself during traditionally restful activities, such as enjoying a meal or conversation with friends?
• When you relax your mind and body, can you fully let go of mental activity and physical tension?

I’m betting you had at least a couple of “no’s” in there.

Most people don’t actually know how to rest properly and often. Instead, we generally go full-tilt all day, cramming in too many activities, over-working, eating at our desks, even efforting hard to “have fun” during off-time. Then at the end of all that we fall into bed, and continue to sleep in the same break-neck way we’ve spent the rest of our day.

This may feel like it’s well known to you. Sure, I know, I should rest more, and get better quality rest. Everybody knows that. What’s that got to do with meditation?

Remember, meditation is to get really clear about what’s happening, so clear in fact that to do anything other than take the best possible care of yourself becomes impossible. So, for the rest element, when you start to meditate, you become aware and then more aware and eventually deeply aware of whether you’re rested or not, when you’re rested and when not, what feels restful and what feels harmful to restfulness. You become an expert at your own states of restfulness, or not, and you subsequently and naturally become an expert at resting.

This does not mean you become lazy, by the way. If you become expert at resting, you become an equal expert at effective, high-energy action when that’s called for. See how this works?

There’s lots more I could say about this topic. I could give you a list of things I do for myself now that I am attuned to my own energy levels throughout the day, and from day to day. But I don’t want to turn this into a to-do list of actions from my own particular circumstances. Each of us has different things that feel restful versus energy-draining. You need to find out what yours are, and then act on them. This is not exactly news to you. But if you haven’t found the means to actually act on this knowledge, maybe it’s only speculation or assumption rather than knowledge that you’re working from.

Or I could tell you about the studies that have shown a marked increase in meditators’ versus non-meditators’ REM sleep. That’s the kind of sleep that cultivates the best kind of healing and restoration, the kind that bodybuilders need for that all-important recovery pillar. Again, interesting facts, but without direct experience of this it’s meaningless.

In my book, the only way to get the truth about all of this is to look deeply into your own experience. And the way to do that properly is to take up a highly disciplined, focused study. I call that meditation.

Margaret is a business owner, mother, mindfulness teacher and meditation floozy. Her interest is in awakening to the truth of what you are, whether that be through profoundest stillness or in the middle of peeling potatoes. You can find her writings about awakening to the all-out, full-blast, top-to-bottom richness of life at her blog, Stumbling Awake.

Most of us run around life like we're mice being chased by a big ass cat. We get up, shower, go to work, go here, eat there, scramble for a parking spot at the gym, go home, do the dishes, wash the laundry, watch TV, and then try to go to sleep.

And then can't fall asleep.

Or we do sleep, but we're more tired when we wake up than when we went to sleep the night before.

All of this nonsense is avoidable and it's killing your progress.

My good friend, Margaret, teaches people how to relax. She left the rat race of the corporate world and started doing what matters: Helping people.

She's agreed to do a guest post here. But she doesn't know what to write about, since we're all kind of gym rats and she's not. But there is one commonality between us and her: We all perform better when we rest, relax, and recover.

So, I have a question for you: What would you like Margaret to write about?

Use the Comments section (down there) to leave your question. She'll pick one and write about it.