Performance & Recovery – gbrmedical.com

Muscular Recovery and Red Light Therapy

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. [1,2] 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. [3]

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. [4] 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. [4] 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. [4]

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. [4] 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.

You should also pay attention to your heart rate and the variability of your heart rate (HRV), a measure of the change in time between each heartbeat. Lower HRV is associated with poor fitness, mood, and increased risk of disease. A higher HRV indicates better cardiovascular fitness and more resilience to stress. HRV is a good way to check how well your lifestyle and level of movement are supporting your heart health. [5]
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. [6] 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. [6] One way to improve your sleep is to align your lifestyle and nighttime routine with healthy circadian rhythms.
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. [7] 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.
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. [8]
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.[9] 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. [10] 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 with a device are 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. [9,11] This can make a big impact on a person’s training and recovery.

There are two primary ways to use light therapy treatments along with exercise and training: either before you work out, or after. The choice is up to you, depending on your health and fitness goals.

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. [12,13]
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. [12,13] Light therapy after training also helps the body process acute inflammation from working out. [17]

Red Light Therapy, Muscle Cells and Performance: Our muscles have trillions of cells, and they all need lots of ATP energy to do their demanding jobs and keep our bodies in balance after bouts of strenuous exercise.

Light therapy treatments have several mechanisms of action on muscle cells, like improvement in cellular ATP energy synthesis, glycogen synthesis, oxidative stress reduction, protection against exercise induced-muscle damage, and the addition of new myonuclei supporting muscle hypertrophy]. Light therapy also supports healing and recovery by improving blood flow and oxygen availability. [9-15]

All of these beneficial effects of light therapy may improve physical performance and enhance post-exercise recovery. Light therapy has also been shown to promote better fatigue resistance in bouts of exercise or strength training programs. [13]

Sources and References:

[1] Ratamess NA, Alvar BA, Kibler WB, Kraemer WJ, Triplett NT. American College of Sports Medicine position stand. Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Med Sci Sports Exerc 2009;41:687-708.

[2] Garber CE, Blissmer B, Deschenes MR et al. American College of Sports Medicine position stand. Quantity and quality of exercise for developing and maintaining cardiorespiratory, musculoskeletal, and neuromotor fitness in apparently healthy adults: guidance for prescribing exercise. Med Sci Sports Exerc 2011;43:1334-1359.

[3] Michael Kellmann, Maurizio Bertollo, Laurent Bosquet, Michel Brink, Aaron J Coutts, Rob Duffield, Daniel Erlacher, Shona L Halson, Anne Hecksteden, Jahan Heidari, K Wolfgang Kallus, Romain Meeusen, Iñigo Mujika, Claudio Robazza, Sabrina Skorski, Ranel Venter, Jürgen Beckmann. Recovery and Performance in Sport: Consensus Statement. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2018 Feb 1;13(2):240-245

[4] So-Ichiro Fukada, Takayuki Akimoto, Athanassia Sotiropoulos. Role of damage and management in muscle hypertrophy: Different behaviors of muscle stem cells in regeneration and hypertrophy. Biochim Biophys Acta Mol Cell Res. 2020 Sep;1867(9):11874

[5] Daniel J Plews, Paul B Laursen, Jamie Stanley, Andrew E Kilding, Martin Buchheit. Training adaptation and heart rate variability in elite endurance athletes: opening the door to effective monitoring. Sports Med. 2013 Sep;43(9):773-81

[6] Michael R. Irwin, Richard Olmstead, Judith E. Carroll. Sleep Disturbance, Sleep Duration, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Cohort Studies and Experimental Sleep Deprivation. Biol Psychiatry. 2016 Jul 1; 80(1): 40–52.

[7] Bakker EN, Matlung HL, Bonta P, de Vries CJ, van Rooijen N, Vanbavel E. Blood flow-dependent arterial remodelling is facilitated by inflammation but directed by vascular tone. Cardiovasc Res. 2008;78(2):341-8.

[8] Tindaro Bongiovanni, Federico Genovesi, Monika Nemmer, Christopher Carling, Giampietro Alberti, Glyn Howatson. Nutritional interventions for reducing the signs and symptoms of exercise-induced muscle damage and accelerate recovery in athletes: c urrent knowledge, practical application and future perspectives. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2020 Sep;120(9):1965-1996

[9] Ferraresi C, Kaippert B, Avci P, Huang YY, de Sousa MVP, Bagnato VS, Parizotto NA, Hamblin MR. Low-level laser (light) therapy increases mitochondrial membrane potential and ATP synthesis in C2C12 myotubes with a peak response at 3-6 h. Photochem Photobiol. Mar-Apr 2015;91(2):411-6.

[10] Törnroth-Horsefield, S.; Neutze, R. Opening and closing the metabolite gate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2008 Dec.

[11] Nicolette N Houreld, Roland T Masha, Heidi Abrahamse. Low-intensity laser irradiation at 660 nm stimulates cytochrome c oxidase in stressed fibroblast cells. Lasers Surg Med 2012;44:429-434