Muscle recovery-When to train again? One of the simplest ways to tell is SORENESS TO TOUCH and LIMITED RANGE OF MOTION. If you still suffer from these, it is important to give your muscle at least another day of rest. The pain we feel in our muscles after a heavy training session is the micro damage to the muscle filaments (fibres). It is the repeated micro damage from regular training sessions that triggers the adaptation that leads to stronger and more toned muscles. However, in order for this to happen, the muscle needs to rest sufficiently, before we inflict damage on it again. In less severe instances, an “active rest” could be sufficient. This could involve light aerobic activity such as walking and stretching. “Light activity stimulates bloodflow through the muscles, which removes waste products to help in the repair process,” says David Docherty, Ph.D., a professor of exercise science at the University of Victoria in Canada. If you want to get more scientific with muscle recovery, there are ways of plotting HEART RATE VARIABILITY. This gives an indication of how well the parasympathetic nervous system functions. (This is the part of the nervous system that concerns itself with everyday tasks, repair and recovery). To get a true reading of heart rate variability, we would also need a reading of the respiration rate. This is impossible to achieve outside a lab. However, there are now various apps that use complicated algorithms and are pretty accurate. Two complete systems for measuring heart rate variability are BioForce HRV and iThlete. Want to read more about this subject? www.breakingmuscle.com