All week long you program workouts that push your members to better themselves physically in the gym during hard workouts, but are you pushing them toward recovery as well? Your members' fitness journey is only as good as their recovery game. Before we get into what recovery tools are essential to supply your members with, we want to jump into the why.
There are two types of recovery: active and passive. Passive recovery is the one you can’t help your clients with. This requires rest. This type of recovery is often referred to as “rest days”. There’s very little-to-no activity these days. This gives your body time to repair the muscles on its own. You can also consider cold exposure, hot tubs, and sauna rooms as a form of passive recovery since there is minimal movement required.
Want to learn more about cold exposure? Check out our blog “Take the Plunge: The Benefits of Cold Exposure”.
In this blog we’ll be talking abll about active recovery. Active recovery requires movement and can be walking, yoga, swimming, or using recovery tools and methods. The benefit of active recovery is that is will help speed up the recovery process by increasing blood circulation and in turn, get rid of waste from soft tissues.
Along with active recovery activities and methods, there are also tools that are great to have on hand at your fitness business that will not only help your members recover quicker and get back to the gym, but also raise the value of your business and services. We pulled together 5 of the best tools to invest in for your business and your members.
Pro Tip: You can start to implement Mobility and Recovery clinics into your schedule as an additional add-on revenue stream. Utilize Wodify Live for sign-ups for easy and seamless event planning.
If you are looking to get some recovery tools for your business, but are not ready to break the bank, lacrosse (or tennis balls!) is a great place to start. The density and size create a perfect combination to help your clients battle any trigger points they might have. If your members start to complain of a certain spot that’s really causing discomfort or pain, break out the lacrosse ball.
Instruct your clients to find the spot (or help them!) place the ball on the area and lean into it. A common spot for these trigger points is the back. They can either lay down on the floor or lean up against the wall. Small movements will end up creating a bunch of relief. Digging into the fascia with the lacrosse ball, helps push blood flow back into those areas and force waste out. Afterwards, make sure to encourage your clients to work through full range of motion of that area. You can find a case of lacrosse balls here.
Another fairly cheap option for your business is the foam roller. The beauty of a foam roller is that it can be done before a workout to help activate the muscle groups, break up sore muscles, and prime your members for the workout. Foam rolling can also be done post-workout to help prevent muscle soreness by sending oxygenated blood to the muscles that were just worked hard.
A foam roller can pretty much be used on any muscle group and depending on which areas you are trying to target there are different types of foam rollers on the market and they come in different sizes, densities, and textures. Amazon offers high-density round foam roller that comes in different lengths. Trigger Point has a bunch of different rollers with different textures to really dig into those muscles. There are great hand-held rollers from Tiger Tail that you might want to consider getting your hands on.
Another budget-friendly tool is yoga blocks. These aren’t only for Yogis, and can be utilized pre-, post-, and during workouts! If part of your clients’ active recovery day is stretching, this is a great tool to help them get deeper into their stretches. They can also be used to support other parts of the body by reducing the amount of muscle fatigue to hold poses and allowing them to “rest” on top of the block instead of having to hold themselves up.
If members are feeling especially tight across the chest from sitting at a desk all day, instruct them to lay their back on top of the yoga block with their arms in a goal-post fashion. This helps gently stretch their muscles, open their chest, and release any built-up tension. Yoga blocks can be found here.
If you’re looking to spend a little more money, percussion guns are a great bang for your buck. Most companies sell their tool with multiple attachments that can be used for different kinds of muscle release.
This type of recovery tool can be used before or after a workout and has benefits for both! Before a workout can help increase mobility, prime the muscles, and work through any soreness left over from the workout before. Post-workout percussion work helps decrease delayed onset soreness, and fires up blood circulation, and lymphatic flow (aka getting rid of that toxic waste).
There are plenty of percussion guns on the market, but two companies that are well-known in the fitness industry are Therabody and Hyperice. Both companies offer different sizes and attachments.
Gone are the days when everyone reaches for IcyHot with so many different options of muscle creams, salves, and balms. Not only are there a ton of different companies that sell muscle recovery rubs, but also types of rubs ranging from medicinal to holistic.
Whether you’re looking to offer holistic types of salves like small-batch CBD from Raw Awakening or big-company Biofreeze or a little more medicinal like IcyHot or Free-Up you’ll be reducing the muscle soreness in your gym in no time.
Pro Tip: Not only should you offer these tools as a way to recover to your clients while in the gym, but they should be recovering at home, too! Listen to our latest webinar with O2 expert, Shane. He breaks down the hows and whys of retail at your fitness business and how Wodify’s Point of Sale System can help these products fly off the shelves.
Do you want to learn more about Wodify Core and how our all-in-one fitness business management system can help take your business to the next level? Book a one-on-one demo with our team today!
