Sleep, Steps, And Snacks: The Recovery Trifecta Your Trainer Forgot

Think your gains come from grinding harder? The real breakthrough happens when you master recovery. We unpack a simple framework—rest, repair, reset—that turns training stress into strength, better sleep, clearer thinking, and steady fat loss without flirting with burnout.

We start by reframing recovery as part of training, not the opposite. Physical recovery gets specific: mobility for full range of motion, active recovery walks to push nutrients into tissues, and sleep as a deliberate performance tool that elevates growth hormone and consolidates memory. We dig into nutrition that repairs and refuels—protein ranges tailored to age and activity, carbs to restore glycogen and support hormonal balance, and omega-3s to lower inflammation—plus the hydration habits that tie it all together.

Stress is stress, so we zoom out to the nervous system and the mind. Learn to spot wired-tired, shallow sleep, and clumsy coordination as red flags, then reset with 4-7-8 breathing, two-minute box breathing, mindful walks, and warm pre-bed showers. We talk boundaries, solo time, and laughter as real tools for emotional recovery, and we walk through hormonal signals—wonky appetite, low motivation, and fading libido—that reveal when your system needs a break. Finally, we call out the traps: training hard on poor sleep, skimping on protein, mistaking the couch for recovery, and chasing failure every session.

If you’re ready to make progress that sticks, build recovery into your plan with the same intention you give your workouts. Share this with someone you care about, subscribe for more evidence-based strategies, and leave a 5-star review to help others find the show. What recovery habit will you start today?

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Listener Request
• 0:54 Recovery As The Prime Pillar
• 2:16 Rest Repair Reset Framework
• 3:21 Why Under-Recovery Stalls Adaptation
• 7:17 Four Types Of Recovery Overview
• 8:19 Physical Recovery Essentials
• 11:41 Nervous System Burnout Signs
• 15:47 Mental And Emotional Recovery
• 20:08 Hormonal Recovery Signals
• 23:10 Sleep As A Performance Strategy
• 26:28 Active Recovery Done Right
• 28:54 Nutrition For Repair And Balance
• 32:30 Hydration As The Connector
• 33:24 Breathwork And Mindful Tools
• 37:25 What To Avoid When Training
• 42:38 Signs You Need More Recovery
• 44:26 Closing Gratitude And Reminders

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Bodyholic with D. And first of all, before we get started, a big thank you to Ben Gonzalez who puts up with me on a regular basis. And also thank you so much for tuning in and listening to episode after episode. But I also have to ask you for something. And here's what I have to ask you for. I need you to share the podcast with people you like and love. If you don't like someone and don't love someone, then don't share. That's totally fine with me. But if you care about them, please share the info, share the love. And if you don't mind, I would really appreciate it if you actually popped in and rated Body Holic with D five stars so that more people can get in touch with me and find out more evidence-based information about health, well-being, and fitness. All right, now that we did some house cleaning there, we're gonna talk about recovery today. And many of you have heard me say that strength training is king. It's the most important thing for your health, for your well-being, for your longevity. I'm gonna put a big little star at the end of that. A big little star. And that's because I'm gonna say actually, recovery is really the most important pillar because without recovery, everything you're doing during your strength training session or your high-intensity session or your cardio or whatever it is that you're doing, without recovery, it's basically gonna be counterproductive. All right. It's gonna end up being creating this kind of vicious cycle and biting you in the ass, if we're gonna be really honest. So today we are talking about recovery as the most important pillar of your health. Welcome to Body Holic with D. We don't do fads here. We give you the facts that move your body and health forward. Wait up, hold up. I'm not a doctor. The information in this podcast is for informational purposes only and not medical advice. So kick back and enjoy the show. The whole concept is rest, repair, reset. That's what it is. It's rest, repair, reset, and not uh completely collapse because you've completely burnt out, right? That's the difference. It's are you doing the rest, repair, reset, or are you collapsing after you completely burn out and have zero energy physically in your muscles, in your brain, emotionally, et cetera, et cetera. We're gonna tackle all that. So the idea is to create structured and intentional physiological recovery. So you want to set it into your training program. In other words, the best training programs are the ones that have the recovery set into them, baked into them, right? It's not just, oh, you need the recovery time after you've completely demolished everything you have, your body and everything else. So if you care about fat loss, if you care about hormones, mood, mental clarity, if you care about your focus, your uh immunity, your immune system, you must absolutely care about recovery, right? Let me just repeat that. If you are one of those people who cares about fat loss, hormones, mood, mental clarity, your focus, uh, your emotional well-being, then you must care about recovery. The episode today is basically me giving you a permission slip. This is what it is. It's it's the official body holic permission slip and your action plan for recovery time. Your body actually gets stronger during the recovery time, not the opposite. Let me say that again. Your body will get stronger through the recovery. Every rep that you lift, every sprint that you smash creates micro stress, uh, which is basically tiny muscle tears. Um, in addition to the fact that there's a lot of nervous system activation and hormonal shifts in this, in this um uh micro stress, right? So in general, it's called micro stress. If we're looking at the muscle, it's micro tears. If we're looking at the nervous system, it's extreme nervous activation, especially when you're lifting really heavy. And we have hormonal shifts during the reps, during uh the sprints, anything that is high intensity. And stress the stress that we're creating in our body is great. Okay, don't get me wrong. Lifting heavy is good. It is stress that is good, but it's only good. It's only good if you give your body what it needs after you've created the stress. So what happens is without proper recovery, the stress actually has this compound effect, and we prolong the time of that cortisol is just kind of sitting in the body and rising. So as opposed to uh having a spike in cortisol and then a reset, it just lingers. Then as another result, it's a result of you know, high stress and also high cortisol, the sleep quality drops. And then as a result of that, the adaptation slows. Adaptation meaning uh what we have cre adapted our bodies toward. So if we're training hard, right, the idea is that our bodies adapt for whatever it is that we're training. If we're, let's take one exercise, for example, if we're doing training for pull-ups, then the more we repeat it, right, the more our bodies have adapted to the pull-ups. So the stronger we get. Unless, unless we are over stressed and under-recovered, and then we have the uh slowing down of the adaptation system. And then injury risks increase, of course. So you don't actually get fitter. All this fitness journey that you're on, it just basically is stopped right there. You get fatigued, you don't get fitter, but you actually get fatigued. And recovery uh is not the opposite of training, it is absolutely 100% part of training. Any seriously uh uh serious professional coach, any trainer who takes himself seriously will actually put the recovery section into the weekly routine. So, um, and which by the way, I'm just gonna say this uh bluntly that's a red flag. If you have a trainer, I'm I'm sorry to say this. Uh, I have, you know, an amazing team of trainers. I love each one of them. I know that each one is super, super responsible. I do know that there are trainers out there who actually won't work recovery into the program. And I'm just gonna say that right now, for you, because of I care about your well-being, that's a red flag. All right, now that we said that, I want to talk about four different types of recovery. But first, I'm gonna take a sip of my coffee, if you will. The first type of recovery is the physical recovery, which is, of course, the muscle repair. It's uh the tissue health, structural adaptation. Um, it's it's the sleep, it's the nutrition, it's the hydration, breath, mobility, low intensity. That's that's basically the list. That's what physical recovery is. Let's get into it a little bit more. So a little deeper. The muscle repair, right? I we just talked about the micro tears that we create in the muscles. If we keep repeating the high intensity lifting, the high reps, the whether it's high reps or heavy lifting, if we keep repeating that without rest days, without recovery days, then we're gonna actually create something that is far beyond micro-tears, but actually we're gonna tear into the muscle and create an inflammation. Um, and then in general, it's not only muscle tears. We also need time to get into tissue health because it is not only the muscles that need that time, but it's also the ligaments, it's also the tendons that are involved, it's also the fascia that's involved and everything else that goes into training. So um, in general, tissue health and of course, specifically muscle repair. And then we've got the structural adaptation. So, uh, like I mentioned before, if we are working towards the specific goal, right? We're we're lifting a specific uh weight and we want to adapt to that weight. We want to build muscle, we want to get bigger, uh, we want to get stronger. We're not gonna adapt if we don't go into the physical recovery. We're not gonna adapt for it. In fact, you're gonna start realizing if you're actually burning out that you can't lift as much as you did even just a few days ago, right? Your body's just gonna start saying, you know, no, I'm not doing that anymore. Like sort of shutting down. And then sleep is another very important part. Nutrition, we're gonna get into that later. Hydration, uh, the um physical recovery is also has a lot to do with breath. So sleep, maybe breathing your way into calming down for your sleep. We're gonna get into all this a little bit later. Mobility training so that you make sure you've got that full range of motion. So a day off, a recovery day, could actually be simply only working on your mobility, on your flexibility, which is really getting into the ROM, the full range of motion of every single joint and just working on that. Um, and and low intensity. Again, we're gonna uh jump into that a little bit deeper. But when I say low intensity, I mean not sitting on the couch, but actually moving. But it could be something like a walk or a gentle bicycle ride or something like that. So that was type one of uh recovery, that's physical recovery that we just talked about. The second type of recovery, and this is the one that really I'm very deeply concerned about when people don't take time to recover, and that's the nervous system recovery. So we already talked about the central nervous system where it's actually getting taxed when you are going for intense workouts, uh, especially heavy lifting or you know, full-on sprinting. Here's what you need to note. In order to understand or identify that your nervous system is too taxed, right? And it really needs recovery. What you need to do is note the following. So your central nervous system gets deeply taxed when you're lifting heavy or going for a full-on sprint. And here's how to identify if you are kind of getting into a nervous system burnout. Ask yourself, identify, take your time, note the following. Are you feeling uh it's called wire tired? Okay, we're gonna put it in quotation marks. That's what that's kind of what it's called, the term for it. Why you're tired is like, I don't know if you have this reference, but I'm thinking about my kids when they're overtired. The idea of overtired, it's like when you've moved past just being tired and ready to go to sleep. And now you're I see this with my kids all the time. They're jumping up and down, but they're actually tired. They actually need to sleep, but they're jumping from one end of the house to the other end of the house and they're laughing and they're giggly and then they're crying. And that's something that happens with adults too, when they are in full-blown taxation of the nervous system. It's the same thing. So note this: are you feeling wired tired? Um, is your sleep uh do you have poor sleep? Is it hard for you to fall asleep? Do you wake up early after not enough sleep? Are you, is your sleep basically uh very shallow? Note, note that. And then another way to actually identify it is if you have decreased coordination. So, especially if you're someone with a lot of coordination, and then all of a sudden, and this happens to me, right? This is a good identify identifying point for me on a personal level. Do I start bumping into things? I literally start bumping into things when I'm burnt out. I just like walk into a corner here, walk into a pole there, and which is weird because I actually have spatial awareness and I actually have good balance. But when I'm overtaxed, I'm I'm just not aware of what's going on around me. So those are three ways to really identify if your nervous system really needs recovery time. And we're gonna get into ways in which you can focus on nervous system recovery, but we're gonna go do that a little bit later. Let's continue with the um forms of recovery. So the third form of recovery is the mental and emotional recovery. Stress is stress. It just is. And your brain doesn't actually separate the stress from heavy lifting from uh stress of the stress of I just had a huge fight with my partner. Okay. So it's just all sending signals to your brain, I'm stressed, I'm stressed, I'm stressed. Whether it's that physical heavy lifting, the nervous system, or whether it's, you know, a really bad day at work, uh, meeting a deadline. It's all stress for the brain. The ways to reduce that and really get into proper mental, emotional recovery is getting into a moment of mindfulness and just kind of settling down into presence. And it could be um as simple as noticing what it is that you're touching, right? So right now I have my hands on a table and just taking a moment to notice the feelings that I feel on my hand from the from the uh uh structure of the table. Um, or even drinking, right? So you can actually make it a whole ceremony of identifying the different senses you have. So I'm now feeling the table or the shirt against my skin. I can take a sip of my coffee and feel the taste and really kind of follow the swallowing all the way until I don't feel the sip anymore. Uh, another option is, and then you can move on to seeing what are you seeing right now, what are you hearing right now, and uh what are you smelling right now? It can be that simple, just noticing your senses. Another thing, and this is important for many women, uh especially, but of course, men and women in general, um, is setting boundaries. When we're in a full mental, emotional burnout state, very often it has to do with the fact that maybe you're a major pleaser and you're saying yes to everybody, but are you actually taking time to even notice those five senses? Are you taking time to actually um be present and really drop into your body for a minute? Notice your breath for a minute. Maybe you've said yes to so many things, and now you're just overtaxed, constantly jumping from one project to another, uh, running to the kids, if you've got kids, one thing after another until the end of the day where you're just completely beat. So that also leads me to another, I would say, uh medicine or something that can help you with the mental and emotional burnout, and that is spending time alone. Which for me, I, you know, I grew up as an only child. So I love that time alone. It's something that's very, very familiar to me. Uh sometimes some people don't necessarily like the time alone. So maybe even go out for a walk alone. So you can actually just listen to your thoughts for a moment, even if it just means being outside, but taking space for yourself. And uh on the other side of the spectrum, another thing that really helps mental and emotional recovery is actually laughter and connection. So it could be just laughter, like putting on, you know, for me, my default is always putting on an episode of Friends, um, or just watching, watching a really good uh stand-up comedy act, but also just sitting down and going for a deep connection with a friend or a loved one and just chatting and talking and really taking the time to be interested and to also also share about each other's days. So there you go. That's the emotional and mental recovery. Again, I'm just gonna recap that stress is stress, whether it is whether you uh did a whole on, full-on overload with weightlifting or sprinting or anything along those lines, and whether you just had a fight with someone or had to meet a deadline, or you're just dealing with even traffic kind of stress. That the brain sees it as stress. So the um idea of mindfulness, noticing your five senses, setting boundaries, taking time alone for yourself, whether it's indoors or outdoors, if it's better for you, outdoors, taking time to laugh and deeply connect with another person. Those can really restore and help recover your mental and emotional system. Four, and this is the last type of recovery I'm going to mention, and that's hormonal recovery. The hormones in your body regulate appetite, sleep, motivation, muscle repair, fat loss, and libido, and so much more, right? Everything in your body is regulated by hormones. So when you are under-recovered, all of these things get disrupted, which is really messed up. Like your appetite gets all over the place, right? That maybe um because the cortisol is high, then your ghrelin uh hormone is now saying, you know, I'm uh we're in, we're in survival mode. We've got to eat something. If we see we've got to eat to calm down the ghrelin. One hormone deals with, uh triggers another hormone, and everything's just out of whack. Or uh the sleep is out of whack because the cortisol levels are high. Uh, you'll notice that your motivation is down, you're feeling depleted. It's not because you are not mentally strong, it's because you have actually created, or your body or your system is under so much stress that all the hype that you normally have, the hormones, the healthy hormones uh that are triggering your motivation, the adrenaline, the oxytocin, all those good fun hormones are now kind of being shut down because you're in much more of a survival mode than anything else. Um and again, the muscle repairs, the hormones, the growth hormone that is in charge of muscle repair as well is uh not working properly, especially if you're not getting adequate sleep, also. So, and the fat loss, libido, these are things that are really important. If you note them, if you notice my libido is gone, or if you notice that you're having trouble adapting to the workouts and your appetite is all off, these are all signs that the hormonal system in your body really needs time to recover. And of course, everything is interconnected, like the four things that I've just mentioned the uh physical recovery, the nervous system recovery, the mental and emotional recovery, and the hormonal recovery, it is all completely interconnected. So there are a lot of aspects that are overlapping. Now, if I if this was a movie, this headline would be like in flashing lights, and we would have dramatic music uh for the most powerful recovery tool that we have. Okay, so let's pretend that we've got flashing lights and dramatic music, and then we zoom in and we say and we see the word sleep. Sleep. During sleep, the growth hormone peaks. We've talked about that. The muscles go through a whole repair process, the nervous system resets the um uh memory is goes through this consolidation, the um uh appetite balances. Sleep is actually a strategy. It's all about um if if you if you think to yourself, you know, I I've heard this often, I still hear this that you know, you'll sleep when you're dead. It's not, it's a strategy, it is part of getting stronger. So the consistent bedtime, the cooling of the house, the not looking at the screen about 30 minutes at minimum, if possible, an hour before bedtime. You don't look at the screen. These are things that are actually really hard for me to do. So I'm I'm talking to myself, not only to you, but actually, this is stuff, these are things that are difficult for the modern person in general. We are always on our screens, we are always scrolling, and it really harms us. It harms our recovery, it harms our building muscles. So if we can decrease this time, uh, this screen time before we go to sleep, it could be so helpful. Um so let me just say this is sleep is the most powerful recovery tool that we have. And I'm also saying this as a mother to uh also I have a very young child as well, and we kind of try to sleep. It's not something that necessarily happens, and yet I'm still saying this, and I do understand that life happens. And I actually lived in a war zone until very recently, and I really understand that life happens, and sometimes sleep is not part of life happening. I do get it. So, what I'm saying is, as a human being who lives in this world, right? I hear people talking about sleep all the time, and they talk about things that are unrealistic in my eyes. It just, you know, like I always mention Dr. Matthew Walker. He, I'm always like, what how can I even try? How can I even attempt to do the things that that he's saying? So I'm saying to you, as a 40-year-old mom who has a career, who uh deals with the kids, who deals with the house, who uh has uh uh my anxieties and my worries, that we tr just try to do our best when it comes to sleep. And yes, it is very, very important. And sometimes at certain points in life, you just try to do your best. All right, let me just be real. So sleep is definitely up there. But we're also going to talk about um a rest day, or rather, what is active recovery, what is real recovery, and why rest days should not be confused with um sitting on the couch with one leg over another with a bag of chips watching Netflix. All right. That's one scenario. Active recovery, real recovery is not that. I'm so sorry to say. It doesn't mean that putting one leg over another with a bag of chips in front of Netflix doesn't have its place. Okay, totally, totally has its place. But let me offer something else in terms of active recovery. So movement actually enhances recovery because it pushes nutrients into the muscles, which um also improves the circulation and improves the stiffness. You know, the feeling of, you know, I just had a really tough workout, I'm super stiff, but then you go for a walk and all of a sudden things are just feeling better. But you actually have to fight the feeling of, I really can't do anything right now. My muscles hurt so much. You do have to get over that. And you do, you will feel so much better if you go for that very gentle, very light walk or very gentle, very light uh cycling session. Um, it will support the recovery and not um over push you. So let me be really, really clear. I'm not talking about going for a full-on workout. Active recovery is very, very, very gentle. It's you know, the thing that I always go for, really, in my life, my active recovery is usually walks, long walks. It could be by the beach while I'm listening to a podcast, it could be uh with the kids, something along those lines. And I'll always feel so much better afterwards. So you're pushing the nutrients into your muscles, you are improving circulation, and you're gonna be decreasing the stiffness so it is supportive and doesn't push you way over the edge. Of course, nutrition is another really important component of recovery. Simply put, simply put, protein repairs. There you go. Simply put, protein repairs. And I'm gonna give you the range. 0.8 grams of protein per kilograms of body weight a day, all the way to 2.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body per day, okay, body weight per day, is what you need. Now that's a major range, what I just said. 0.8 to 2.5. So the thing is, it depends, of course, how physically active you are. If you're relatively sedentary and under 40, so 0.8 to 1.0 might be enough. Uh, once you hit 40, you might want to increase it. So it would be 1.0 to 1.2. Or if you're super active, you might even actually climb all the way up to the 1.8, 2.0, 2.5, all depending on how active you are. And of course, there are guides, you can Google it, uh, regarding your physical activity, your endurance, the weight you're lifting, how hard you're working, and of course the grams uh of weight or the grams of protein per kilogram per day. Uh, carbs. Simply put, they refill. They refill post-workout uh the glycogen stores. And that helps with your hormonal balance. Yes, I have heard of keto diets. I have. I've even tried it before in the past when I was, you know, I can never say no to a good challenge. So I've tried it. I'm okay with it. If this really, really works for you and you swear by a keto diet, all right, fine, go for it. I'm just gonna tell you, I'm gonna share my thought here with you. Glycogen repairs and helps so much with hormonal balance. Um, it helps uh with inserting the um protein into the muscles because it activates the insulin. And I'm a little iffy about all the uh no carb or very low carb diets, but we can talk about that another time. Uh another thing, and this is something that I'm I'm gonna say, I'm kind of confessing here: omega-3 fatty acids, they are so important. There is so much research on this. They are so important in reducing inflammation. Now, I stopped taking omega-3 fatty acids. So um, I'm also, this is one of those moments where I'm like saying it to you and to myself. I'm I'm saying to myself, D, self, start taking omega-3 again. Uh, so so that's that. Um, but really the research is extremely vast on omega-3, on cognitive health, on physical activity, on reducing inflammation. So I'm making a note here for everyone involved, including me. Let's get back into it. And uh, I'll probably share with you which one I decide to take when I get back to it. I have to take that leap. Now, um, one other uh pillar for recovery is hydration, which basically is the foundation for everything I just talked about. It helps with the nervous system reset. Um, it helps with pushing the nutrients into the body, with the blood flow, with the feeling of stiffness. Uh, hydration basically makes it all happen. It's like um if if we have all these different things, all these different patches of recovery tools, and we want to sew it all together. Hydration is the needle and thread. Now, um, I want to give you some tools that you can just pull out of your pocket for specifically nervous system reset. And I mentioned before when we were talking about the nervous system overload, that we're gonna get into it a little bit more. So here's that moment for nervous system reset. I believe so strongly in the 478 breathing before you want to go to sleep or after a lot of stress and you need to kind of uh shift gears. For me, very often it's like shifting gears from a lot of work and high stress to picking up the kids. So the 478 means that you inhale for four, you hold for seven, and then you exhale for eight, and then you do that again. So we can eat if you're not driving, please close your eyes, take a moment so you feel this. We'll do it together, and then we'll move on. So if you can, we close our eyes and then inhale for four, three, two, one, and then hold your breath for seven, four, three, two, one exhale for eight, six, five, four, three, two, one, and we're gonna only do that one session. But you could do it two more times, you could do it three more times, and even after one cycle of that, you're probably also gonna start noticing that your pulse just dropped, that you just became calmer. Now, another strategy that you can just pull out of your pocket, and this is less for um getting ready for bed, is the two-minute box breathing. So, what you do is you set the timer for two minutes, and then you inhale for four, like I just counted, the four, three, two, one kind of count, and then you hold your breath for four, then you exhale for four, and then you hold for four. So you um inhale, one, two, three, four, hold your body full of air, three, two, one, then you exhale, three, two, one, then you hold no air, two, one, and then you keep going until the timer of the two minutes uh stops. So that immediately will just kind of reset everything. Another thing is going for a mindful walk. So one of the things I love, and I haven't done this in a while, is walking barefoot on the beach on the sand and actually really just paying attention to the feeling of the sand against the feet. It kind of goes back to what we were saying regarding just sitting in, dropping into your body and just paying attention to the five senses, what's going on. So if you go for a mindful walk, you're literally thinking about lifting the leg and then placing the heel on the floor or the sand, and then going into that point position from flex to point, feeling the structure, the um the feeling of the sand, of the sand grains, that whole thing, the wind against your skin, really the whole experience. Uh, that is a very, very powerful way to reset the nervous system. And another way to reset the nervous system before sleep and after a stressful day is actually a warm shower. And the feeling is kind of going in and washing the day off of you. So it's the break of everything that was going on during that day, and then pausing everything, making it almost ceremonial, walking into the shower, just letting that warm water wash everything off of you, resetting for that important, important moment of your day, which is sleep. So, with all that and the things that I would love for you to do, let's talk about what we want to avoid. And this is gonna take us to just a few more minutes. So bear with me. We want to avoid training hard with inadequate sleep. That's basically uh one of the bottom, bottom lines that we're talking about. Training hard with inadequate sleep is a recipe for disaster. It really is. The um willingness that I often see, especially uh the under 30 group of people, of you know, I just went to sleep at uh midnight or 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. And I'm gonna wake up at 6 a.m. because I'm gonna bang out my workout at 6 a.m. because that's just what I do every day. And I don't skip a workout. Skipping a workout is for weak people, that whole mindset. Um I'm gonna say it's a pretty screwed-up mindset and it's super unhealthy and it completely defeats the purpose. And if everything I just said during this episode has not convinced you, then please write to me on Instagram or email me. Just get to me, because I I want to understand what part you didn't understand. All right. We've got to get, we've got to get to the bottom of it. Um, so training hard with an adequate sleep, that's something that I see often. And that is something that, in my opinion, is unacceptable and will lead to uh harmful effects, whether it is, again, uh one of the four, whether it's physical, um deep physical need for recovery, which means that you are not adapting. Well, which means that you're constantly tired. It could be the hormonal regulation, it could be the mental and emotional stress, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one. Another thing that you want to avoid is not eating enough protein, especially if you're uh, you know, training hard. I see this in particular with women. Ladies, ladies, you will not bulk up if you train hard and um eat protein, right? You you need the protein for the most basic things in your health, in your well-being, in the way you operate. Uh, so please, the whole protein to suit your workout, that is really, really, really important for you as well. I'm just mentioning the things that I uh hear very often. It's it's the young people who feel like they don't need to sleep, but they also want to train hard. It's the women who don't want to supplement with protein, whether it's through just your meals or actually supplementation, you need adequate protein. Especially women over 40 who are uh a little bit more on the thin side, you are also more likely to experience osteopenia or osteoporosis, in which case, really calcium and protein, ladies, super, super important. Now, another thing you want to avoid is uh is confusing rest with inactivity, right? We talked about active recovery. So um the active recovery means going for something that is very low intensity, and it could be mobility work, it could be a very gentle ha the yoga session. Um, it could be a walk. It's it's not, and again, I'm saying there is a time and a place for everything. The Netflix bag of chips is fine for that time and place, but it's not the act of recovery that you want to build into your strategy. Um, so that's it. You don't, you don't, and oh, one more thing I just want to say, this is what you want to avoid training to the max on a regular basis, every single training session, getting to the max, hitting failure is also it's a big no-no. That's completely counterproductive. Okay. Not every single workout has to bring you to failure. In fact, please don't bring every single workout to failure. So we've got, we're gonna end today's session with uh signs for recovery and signs for uh need for recovery. If you feel that your libido is elevated, if you feel mental sharpness, mental clarity, if you're feeling like you are getting stronger with or from workout to workout, then you're doing great and you're getting active recovery and you're getting out adequate, excuse me, adequate recovery. But if you feel like you're irritable, um you're constantly fatigued. If you feel like you're hungry, super hungry, then you're not hungry and it's just all out of whack in terms of um uh the nutrition and hunger and fullness satiety signs from your hormones. If you feel like it's all out of whack, then you are in need for recovery. If you feel like um you are constantly kind of getting dazed and confused or you're a little foggy, you are in need for recovery. If you're getting angry over everything, but you're not really sure why, you're in need for recovery. So recovery is not laziness, right? It's not a weakness. It's not you're lagging or falling behind everybody, it's strategy. And it's part of being a responsible athlete, whether you're an amateur athlete, you just lift weights, or you're a full-on professional athlete. It's just part of the strategy. So, and and part of your longevity and overall well-being. So, with that, I'm going to thank you so much for listening in today. If you have any questions, if you have any comments, I'm always on Instagram waiting for you, or you are more than welcome to email me. You've got a button right over somewhere uh around this episode. And I'm always curious to hear your thoughts and hear anything that you have to share. Thank you so much. Don't forget to share. Don't forget to rate us five stars. And just remember that I know you got this.