432: It's Not Just Stretching and Foam Rolling: The Science of Recovery Episode 2 Active and Passive Recovery

Recovery isn’t just what happens when you stop running — it’s where the real progress happens. In this week’s episode, we’re diving into the science behind active and passive recovery so you can understand how each plays a vital role in helping you become a stronger, more resilient runner.

I’ll break down what’s actually happening inside your body during recovery and why alternating between rest and movement matters.

You’ll learn:
🏃‍♀️ The difference between active and passive recovery — and when to use each
💡 How gentle activities like walking, easy cycling, or mobility work can boost blood flow, calm your nervous system, and speed up tissue repair
🧘‍♀️ Why stretching and foam rolling aren’t magic fixes — but can still play an important part when used the right way
🗓️ How to fit recovery strategically into your week so you can train smarter, feel better, and keep improving without burning out

Because recovery isn’t just about doing less — it’s about doing the right things to support your body, mind, and long-term running goals.

Ready to make recovery one of your strongest training tools? Let’s dive in.

If you want more support creating a recovery routine that actually fits your life, check out our 30-Day Running Reset — it’s designed to help you rebuild the foundation of your running through smart training, balanced recovery, and mindful movement.

00:37 Active vs Passive Recovery

03:07 Understanding Active Recovery

03:47 Benefits of Active Recovery

07:26 Passive Recovery Explained

10:52 Stretching: Myths and Facts

12:16 Dynamic vs Static Stretching

18:31 Importance of Mobility Work

21:13 Foam Rolling: Benefits and Techniques

29:12 Summary and Practical Tips

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Welcome back to the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 432. Today we are continuing our series on recovery and the science of recovery and how recovery is so important for you to actually gain the benefits of your training. So if you missed last week, go back and catch last week. We went over a lot of the basics of recovery to help you understand the science behind why recovery is so important and hitting like those major cornerstones like sleep and fueling and hydration that will help you to recover better and gain more benefits from your workouts. Today we're gonna be being digging into. Active versus passive recovery and talking about things like stretching and foam rolling because when I talk to a lot of runners, especially runners that are injured or that are experiencing a lot of aches or pains, one of the things they often say is, I know I just need to stretch more. So today I'm gonna talk about the science behind that and why stretching might not be the answer. So stay tuned. What's up runners? Welcome back to the show today. It's a solo Angie episode and I'm excited to be talking to you all about active versus passive recovery. Like I mentioned in the intro, there's so many runners that I talk to that think they just need to stretch more. They think that stretching will help them to feel better and prevent injury, but that is not true. Spoiler alert that's not, definitely not the full picture. So today I really wanna go over helping you understand the scientific effects of. Popular recovery methods, what's supported by science, what simply feels good because there's nothing wrong with that either. if you enjoy doing something and it feels good, keep doing it. I'm not gonna tell you not to do it. My goal is to help you understand what is backed by science and. So that you can use more things more intentionally and you can decide where you want to spend your time. Because as a real life runner, you are limited on time. I know you're busy with lots of different things, and so if you can gain more benefits doing one thing versus another, I want you to know that and then you can make the best choice for you. So let's talk about this a little bit and why recovery matters. Okay. Like we mentioned last week. Recovery is something that is absolutely essential for your training because recovery is a full body activity. It's a systemic activity. There are those three systems that we talked about, your muscular system, your hormone hormonal system, and your neural system that all need to recover after exercise. So we have to look at all three of those things when it comes to evaluating these different tools that we have. So the main difference that we wanna talk about today is active versus passive recovery. So what the heck is the difference if. Active recovery is a low intensity movement that maintains your circulation and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. So this is something like going for an easy walk, going for an easy bike ride, doing some mobility work, some restorative yoga. It's basically just moving the body in a very gentle, controlled way, and active recovery is so beneficial. This has been studied in a lot of different research studies out there. And. There. They all basically point to active recovery is good for the body, and there's various mechanisms here. One of the reasons that active recovery is good for you is because it increases your blood flow to that area. Now, as we've mentioned. During your workouts, especially during your harder training sessions, you are breaking the body down and it is during recovery that your body's actually building back stronger than it was before. Assuming that you are giving it the right tools and the right building blocks that it needs to build that muscle and those tissues back stronger. The way that those nutrients and things are delivered to that area that needs repair is through the blood. So when you increase blood flow to the area, that is a good thing that helps to accelerate the removal of the metabolic byproducts that are created during exercise. Because when you're breaking down tissue, there are byproducts that are formed, and so when you increase the blood flow to that area, it can flush out that area. You wanna get rid of some of those metabolic. Byproducts. And then it also helps to bring in those repair cells, right? Like it brings, more oxygen to that area. It brings in the proteins and the amino acids, and all the things that your muscles and your tissues need to repair. So increased blood flow is a very good thing. That's definitely what we want to promote during recovery. Like I mentioned, we also, when you increase blood flow, that brings more oxygen and nutrients to that muscle tissue, so it's also helping to improve that. The third thing that it does is it helps to keep the nervous system engaged in a low stress state. So when you're doing active recovery, basically we talked about this last week, I believe your nervous system has two main states. There's your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight mode that is activated during exercise, especially during high intensity exercise. And there's your parasympathetic, which is your rest and digest, or like I like to call it rest, digest, and repair mode. And that's the state that we want our body to get into during recovery. And so when we use active recovery, when we're doing these low. Low level, gentle movements. things like walking, easy, biking. We're promoting all of these things and our body is in a very low stress state. We're not a, it's, we're not going hard enough that we are jumping into sympathetic mode. We are keeping our parasympathetic state activated and just keeping our nervous system nice and relaxed. So that's really what we wanna know when it comes to active recovery. So when I say active recovery, I'm not talking about, a 20 mile moderate to hard bike ride. That's another training session. But if you're going out on a nice, easy, relaxed bike ride, fantastic. as long as you feel relaxed and you feel like this is an easy thing for you, that is a good thing. You, it's really important for you to go by how you feel. And one of the things that I always like to point to with this is yoga. So for me, I love using yoga as active recovery. I enjoy yoga. I like the mind body connection of it. I like flowing through these different positions. Kevin will tell you that he's not a big fan of yoga because yoga's a harder thing for him to do because he does have some more muscle length restrictions. He's not as flexible as I am, and so for him. Doing yoga is a more high stress type of activity, so it's the same exact activity. We're both doing yoga, but for me, it puts my body in a very relaxed, low stress state. Whereas Kevin, it puts him in a higher stress state. So it's your, it's the way that your body responds to that thing. Okay, so that's active recovery. It's very movement based, gentle controlled, intentional movement. Passive recovery, on the other hand, are things that are done to the body rather than by the body. So that's like a good way to think about it. So things that you're doing to the body, like foam rolling, massage compression. Ice baths. Okay. Those types of things. Or just taking a full rest day, that would be passive recovery. So it's like the things that you're doing to the body or just not doing at all. So these things can also be very effective, depending on which ones we're talking about here, because these also help to regulate your nervous system and help you to get into that parasympathetic mode. Which again, that's what we want. It also, they can also help to rece reduce perceived tension or discomfort. However, they have less direct impact on tissue repair when you compare it to active recovery. Okay? So yes, your tissues are repairing themselves in this state, but. Research shows us that active recovery has a more direct impact and leads to more tissue repair, faster tissue repair when compared to passive recovery. So both of these things have value. active recovery and passive recovery are both very good. The key is to match the method to your goal and to your timing within your training cycle. Okay. So I like to use both and we encourage. All of our athletes to take a rest day, at least once a week. It depends on who they are and what else is going on in their life and what they're training for and their level of experience and all sorts of different things. But we do encourage a full rest day. Now, with that being said, a full rest day can include and we. Encourage them to do some active recovery on that rest day, so it doesn't mean you're just sitting on the couch watching TV all day long, going out for a nice walk, going for an easy bike ride. These like very, again, gentle, intentional movements. Are very good for the body, and especially if you are a woman over 40 that is going through perimenopause or maybe you're already into menopause because of the hormonal changes. There's a lot of, as we lose estrogen and progesterone, there's a lot of tissue changes that can happen in the body as well. And a lot of women find that taking a full passive recovery day where they really don't do anything can actually make them even more sore. So a lot of women over 40 find that. That intentional active recovery is actually better for their body and helps them to recover more quickly than just total rest. Okay? So you have to do what's right for you. if it's like the day after your first marathon and your body's just wrecked and you're feeling super sore, taking a nap and just laying in bed all day might be a great choice for you. However, it might also be a good choice for you to just go out on a walk. It doesn't have to be an hour long walk. It doesn't have to be a speed walk. It could be like a, just a nice relaxed 15 to 20 minute walk. And that again, helps to improve that blood flow, helps to flush out some of those byproducts, helps to bring, nutrients and oxygen to the area to help your body start to kickstart that repair process. All good things. Okay, so benefits to both active and passive recovery. Hopefully you understand the difference now. So what I wanna talk about now are some of the big th three of the big things that a lot of runners do. Okay? These are typically when I speak to runners and talk about recovery and those kinds of things. These are some of the big ones that people often go to. So the first one I wanna talk about is stretching because, so again, I know I've said this multiple times already, but so many runners think, oh, I just need to stretch more. And that may or may not be true because stretching, the way that most people think about stretching is static stretching. And static stretching is holding a position. It's like putting your body into a position and holding that position for 30 plus seconds, right? Over 30 seconds. And this has a. Limited effectiveness, especially in the research studies. Okay, it's, we're gonna go into this in a second, but that's basically what static stretching is, and I think that's what most people think of when they think about stretching. So there are two types of stretching, okay? The first one is static stretching, which is what most people think about, where you just, you get into that position and you just hold it for 30 seconds or 60 seconds or whatever it might be. The second one is dynamic stretching. And dynamic stretching is movement based. So this is more like active mobility types of things. So things like leg swings, hip circles, it can be like lunging, getting into a position, then coming out of a position. Runner's lunge is one of my favorite ways to dynamically stretch. there's so many good stretches, but basically dynamic stretching. Includes movement. So you gently move yourself into a position and then you gently move yourself out. You don't hold a position for an extended period of time, so which one's better to use? Which one do we really wanna focus on? Dynamic stretching has been shown in multiple research studies to be the most ideal way to stretch for most people. And this is the type of stretching that you want to do before your run because it helps to prepare your body for. Whatever you're about to do, okay, so say you're about to run, it helps prepare your body for running. Say you're about to do a strength session. It helps to prepare your body for strength training, and you want your dynamic stretching before your workout to match what you're going to do. So if you are about to go out on a run, you wanna make sure that your dynamic stretching includes the muscles and the. Movements that you are going to do in running. So you wanna definitely make sure that you are doing like some forward backward motions, right? Because your legs are gonna be moving forward and backward over and over again. So things like leg swings here are very helpful. doing things like lunges or squat just to open up the hips. These are all very helpful types of things. If you're gonna be doing a stretching or a strength training session, you want your warmup to also include some of the things I just mentioned and some of the. Mimic some of the movements that you're going to be doing during your strength session. So say you've got squats on. Your plan for that day, doing some simple body weight squats to help yourself warm up, is helping to prime your body for the upcoming activity. So that would be a great thing. So before you just jump under the barbell and put, plates on each side and start doing your squats, just doing some body weight squats or doing some bo squats with just the bar before you put any plates on. Also, a really good thing'cause you're just, again, priming your body for movement. And there's, like I said. Active dynamic stretching has been shown. It can be called either, it can be called active stretching or dynamic stretching. it's been shown to improve your power and your coordination without impairing strength. Okay. That's a really important thing because static stretching or passive stretching. Has been shown to do the opposite. it has been shown that it can in impair your strength or your power and your coordination if you use it before a workout. So static stretching, like I mentioned, is holding that position. this can be useful. It, we don't wanna do this before a run. Okay. I'm just gonna go ahead and Jump out there and say that. So before a run, before a workout, you want to only focus on dynamic stretching. So moving into a position and then moving out of it static stretching you do not wanna do before a run. Because like I said, it has been shown that to, it does have the possibility that it could impair your performance, however. Passive stretching or static stretching can be youth useful after your run or after your workout or outside of training if you are limited in your flexibility. Okay, so a lot of people, like not everyone needs to stretch. Not everyone needs to perform static stretching. And there's a lot of people out there that tell you, oh, everybody needs to stretch. maybe not. Because if you have an adequate amount of flexibility to do the things that you wanna do in your life, you really don't need to do much static stretching. Dynamic stretching, yes, absolutely. We should all be doing dynamic stretching. We should all be doing mobility work. Okay. But static stretching, where you're actually just holding that position for 30 to 60 seconds hasn't been shown to be that effective. The way, there was one study that showed that in order to actually increase the length of the muscle tissue, which is what you're trying to do when you're sta when you're stretching, right? When you're stretching, you're actually trying to lengthen the muscle tissue in order to get a significant difference in significant change in the length of that muscle tissue. You actually have to hold the stretch for two to five minutes, and you have to do that at least five times per week, and you have to do that for 10 to 12 weeks before you actually see a difference in the length of your muscle tissue. And most people aren't doing that. Okay. If that's you, if you feel like you're, you actually have a muscle length limitation and flexibility is a good idea for you, then that's basically what you have to do. You have to hold these stretches for a long time. It can increase your long-term flexibility if you do it often, but like one stretching section is not really going to do much for you. Okay? Static stretching needs to be done. If your goal is to increase muscle length and increase flexibility, that has to be done. Pretty much every day, five to seven days per week for a an extended period of time for you to actually see a difference Now. The other thing that they, research has shown is that it had a limited effect on muscle soreness or on recovery rate. so if you're using it because you think, oh, if I stretch after my session, I'll be less sore tomorrow. Research is showing that's not really the case. However, just because research shows that doesn't mean that it might not be true for you. So again. N of one study of one U are the most important variable here because the research can show one thing, but research, remember, is conducted on a group of people and they basically take the summary of those people and say, this is what worked for the most people, or This is what had a significant effect on the most people and. There are always outliers. There are always people that maybe it didn't do, like maybe the overall study is showing that this intervention like stretching was effective or not effective, but there's one person or a couple people that it was super effective for or not effective at all for, right? So the most important person in this equation is you. Okay? Keep that in mind, just because science or research doesn't support the thing, if you find a benefit to doing the stretching, if you feel better after doing stretching, then do it. Just don't do it before your run. Don't do it before your workout, because like I said, that does have the potential to impair your performance. so if you want to stretch and you like stretching and you like the way it feels, just do it afterwards. Okay? But if you're not currently stretching, you definitely need to be. Incorporating more dynamic stretching and dynamic mobility in your warmups before exercise, and then that dynamic stretching is also beneficial after exercise as well. Okay, so that kind of leads me into this idea of mobility work Now, mobility work, to me is the most overlooked recovery tool that we have. I think that all runners need to be doing some form of mobility work. The. Amount of mobility work and the degree of the mobility work is different for everybody. Everyone should be incorporating some sort of mobility work into their week. So mobility work is basically what I just talked about with like dynamic stretching. It's controlled intentional movement through your available range, and it also incre, it includes stability. Okay. So basically what mobility work is it's blending all these things. It's blending flexibility and strength and neural control. So it's your body's ability to control itself during. Your available or throughout your available range of motion. Okay, so mobility work is so good for the body. It helps improve joint lubrication. It helps to improve your motor control and your movement efficiency. It enhances recovery by helping you to maintain quality movement patterns and also helps to promote blood flow to that area like we talked about. And it can also help your nervous system reset because when you're doing mobility work often, and yoga is a good example of mobility work. You don't have to do yoga specifically, but. One of the benefits of yoga, and one of the things I would encourage anyone to do when they're doing mobility work is to integrate your breath and your awareness, like your body awareness. You're not just like trying to get through this movement, so you're thinking about. The movement, and you're moving very intentionally through these ranges. And when you combine the breath with that, it becomes even more powerful because your breath helps to regulate your nervous system. And then your nervous system will help to regulate your tissue tightness or your body's perceived level of tightness in the body. You can really help your body relax and jump into parasympathetic recovery mode. By using mobility work, especially with the breath. Okay. So I am a huge proponent of mobility work. I think that everybody should be doing this, Definitely as like a warmup. It's great. It's fantastic as a cool down after exercise. And you can do these just for five or 10 minutes on your easy days or on your recovery days or before bed. Mobility work. Before bed, especially if you're integrating the breath is so beneficial and can actually help people to sleep better. It can actually help to improve the quality and the quantity of your sleep. So there's a lot of people that find that some gentle mobility work right before bed is very beneficial for the body. And the last thing I wanna talk about today is foam rolling. So foam rolling is one of those things that runners either love to do or hate to do. It's like a lover hate relationship. There's some people that are in the middle, but I would say there's a lot of people, on one of the two ends. And I want you to understand what is going on during foam rolling so you can decide whether or not you wanna use this. When we look at the science there, there has been multiple meta-analyses. There's, so there's tons of research studies, and then a meta-analysis that kind of, so what that means is a meta-analysis is a research study that essentially looks at lots of other research studies and summarizes them. So it takes, 20 different. research studies about foam rolling and breaks down and puts it all together to figure out, okay, what is the overall data saying? Not just what is the data from this one specific research study saying, but what is all the data saying? And when we look at lots of different studies that have been done on foam rolling. Some of the things that we see are that it can reduce muscle soreness, specifically doms, delayed onset muscle soreness. it can be, it can significantly reduce that. In some people, it can improve temporary range of motion without decreasing strength.'cause this is important because there are some interventions out there that will improve your range of motion, but. They do so at the expense of decreasing strength within that range. So what they have shown, or what some studies have found is that foam rolling can improve temporary range of motion without decreasing strength. And so there are some benefits here, right? So there's some benefits to foam rolling if you wanna be less sore. some other studies show that it helps to improve blood flow to that area. That is one of the mechanisms that actually works. but. It's important that you understand what's going on. I guess it is and isn't important, right? Because if it works. Does it really matter what's happening? But there are some people that think that when you foam roll, you're actually getting in and breaking up adhesions in the fascia or in the muscle, and that's not actually what's happening. So there's a couple things that are actually physiologically happening with foam. Number one is that you're increasing the blood flow to the muscle. There has been mult multiple studies that show that foam rolling increases blood flow to the area that you're foam rolling, and when you increase blood flow, just like we talked about with dynamic stretching and active recovery and those things, that's going to do lots of good things. Increasing blood flow to an area is going to help. To flush out any of the metabolic byproducts that might still be there. It's gonna help improve oxygenation to the tissue. It's gonna help bring nutrients and the repair crew in. So all of those are good things. So just increasing blood flow to an area that is sore or tight is a good thing. Okay. So if it's not actually breaking up the adhesions or loosening the fascia, what is actually happening? what it's actually doing is. Producing a nervous system response. So it's not actually physically changing the tissue composition or the tissue alignment, but what it's doing is it's reducing your body's perception of tightness. So that's a nervous system response. So the way that your body perceives tightness can be changed. And When you have an area of tissue that is tight, especially if it's like a quote unquote knot right? Like we talk about knots in the tissue, that's an area where there is muscle or tissue or things that are you can feel knots in the body, right? Like you can feel them when you're actually palpating the body. But that's an area where those muscles and those tissues have tightened up. It's like a tightening response that is a nervous system response. And so the foam roll will basically help your body change its perception of tightness and help the nervous system, the nerves, and the tissues to essentially just relax. Okay? So you're not actually breaking up adhesions, but you are helping the tissue to relax. And that's a good thing, right? So foam rolling can be effective. So when should we use it? If you wanna choose, if you wanna use some foam rolling. It is best to use it after training or on recovery days. you can use it before, like there ha, there was some studies that showed that using it before a workout again increases blood flow and can help warm those tissues up. But it's, it's up to you what kind of feels good for you again. That's one of those things that we always go back to that study of one, that study of you. Does it feel good? Does it feel, help you feel looser? Does it help you feel more relaxed? If so, that's a good thing. You can use it before exercise, but it's probably more effective if you use it afterwards or on recovery days. Okay, so when you do foam rolling, how are you gonna do this? Number one, you wanna do it slowly. Okay. So you're gonna try to move at about one to two inches per second and do about 30 to 60 seconds per region. I, at most, maybe a couple of minutes. And then you move on to the next section. If you are doing it for an extended period of time, I don't think it's going to necessarily hurt you, but it's just going to not be very effective. It's going to lose its effectiveness, and so essentially you're just wasting your time. You want to use a moderate pressure, you want to definitely avoid excessive pain because if you find one of those spots, and if you've ever rolled your IT band, you probably know what I'm talking about. Which by the way, don't ever roll your IT band. It's really, there's really no point. it's definitely not beneficial on the IT band itself. because the IT band is purely fascial. There's not actual muscle tissue there, but. You know how painful some sometimes this can be, right? And so when you. Have a high level of pain. When you're doing something, what, what often happens, your body tightens up, right? Like you, you like wince and you're, you crunch up and your body tightens, and that's the opposite of what we're trying to do here. Foam rolling is trying to help the nervous system relax and try to increase parasympathetic. But if you find that spot of like intense pain you're in, tighten you like your body tightens up, which is actually increasing your sympathetic tone, it's doing the opposite. So instead of focusing on like smashing the tissue, focus on breathing and relaxation. So oftentimes what I'll have people do when they foam roll, I'll have'em go nice and slow, loosen up that tissue, and then we can do something called an active release technique, which. Can be effective. again, different research shows, different things on this, but a lot of people find relief with this and I'm of the belief that even if there's not a ton of scientific research to back something up, it can still be a useful tool for some people. So what I'll have people do is if they are foam rolling and they find an area of tightness. To just stop the foam roller there for a couple of seconds and just breathe, take some deep breaths and try to let the tissue just relax in that spot. If the pain is too much and you can't loosen up, like you can't, breathe into it and relax, it's again, you're tightening up and producing the opposite result of what you want. So if you can take a couple deep breaths and start to let that tissue relax a little bit. So let's say you're foam rolling your quads, right? So that means your face down, the foam roller is on the front of your thigh, and you find that spot. I have people bend the knee and straighten the knee. So you're flossing the tissue over that compressed area, which again, can lead to a reduced perception of tightness and can allow the tissue to relax. And people find that to be a lot of people can find it to be a very effective way to relax the tissue. When you are able to sync your foam rolling with, again, breathing to help activate that parasympathetic system, it's going to be even more effective. Okay, so to summarize the things that we've talked about already, things that you absolutely should be doing. Number one, active recovery. All right, so on an easy day, doing an easy walk, easy bike riding. The day after our hard session. It's very simple. It's very effective. Move your body, okay? That helps to improve circulation. It helps to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, and there's good, strong evidence for this. Okay? The other thing you should be doing is dynamic stretching or mobility. This is, again, active recovery. It helps with your readiness, with your coordination, joint health, movement quality. It is best during a warmup or. A cool down or just a daily short practice, right? You can use dynamic stretching and mobility any time of day. You can do before, after just, before bed when you wake up in the morning to get the body moving. There is strong evidence that this is very good for your body. It enhances performance, it integrates the mind to body connection, all good things. Okay? I believe people should be doing dynamic stretching and mobility every single day if possible. Okay. What about static stretching? That's passive recovery. It's good if you need to increase your flexibility, if you want to increase the length of your muscle. And if you want to do static stretching, you should do so after your workout at the end. or in the evening. There is some moderate evidence that this can be effective, but it's not going to enhance your recovery that much. All right, and then foam rolling, of course, also is a passive form of recovery. It can help to reduce soreness. It can help to improve your range of motion. It's best used after a workout or on a rest day. And the way that really works is through the nervous system modulation. It helps to decrease your nervous system tone. Okay, so that's really what we wanna go for. So if you're thinking about, okay, how do I actually incorporate these things into my week after an easy run, it's gonna be a great idea for you to do five minutes of gentle mobility or even some foam rolling just to help maintain your tissue quality, help to relax your nervous system and get you into recovery mode after a hard run or a long run. Going back to last week's episode, you wanna prioriti prioritize your nutrition and hydration first. Okay? Make sure you get that in. And then if you wanna add some light foam rolling or some lighter stretching later in the day, totally fine. on your rest days, you can make it a full rest day, but you could also do some low intensity active recovery like walking, yoga, swimming. That would just help improve your circulation and improve your body's, ability to recover. And then. In the evening before you go to bed, great, ID great time to do some, again, mobility work to help calm your body down. If you wanna add in some foam rolling or some stretching at that time, you can do so as well. So what I hope you're taking away from this is that it's not just. a mechanical thing that's going on in your body, right? Recovery is not just about repairing the micro tears in the tissues. There's a huge neurological component to this. And when we are doing like a very gentle, controlled, rhythmic movement that signals to your brain and to your nervous system that you are safe, and that allows your body to shift from that. Sympathetic fight or flight mode into parasympathetic rest and restore mode. So any recovery tool that you're using that's going to help lower your muscle tone and slow your breathing down and get you more mindful and just allow some gentle movement is going to help you shift from sympathetic into parasympathetic. And so your intention and your control and your thought behind it is very important. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to be. Hyper-focused on every single little movement. Like you can just go through the flow and go through some routines sometimes. But when you add the awareness, when you add the breath, when you are more intentional, that is going to make it more effective. Alright? So do not skip your recovery. That is like the overall takeaway from this whole series. You need recovery. And today, I hope from this episode you understand that active recovery is what we wanna prioritize more than passive recovery. Passive recovery is totally fine, but active recovery helps to move the blood, helps to relax your nervous system. Passive recovery also helps to calm your nervous system. Both matter, right? So we wanna make sure that we are incorporating both in our weekly routine. I hope you understand that it's not just about stretching, because stretching is not going to erase your soreness. It's actually not going to improve your performance necessarily, but it can support your flexibility and it can help with relaxation if you enjoy it. mobility is something that you definitely need to be doing. Every day if possible, even just five minutes of mobility every day is hugely beneficial. If you can't do it every day, don't sweat it, right? Try to get it in a couple times a week and understanding that, there's lots of different tools at your disposal, but the most important thing is you using these things intentionally and seeing how they work for you. Because even if the science says that it's great and you hate it and it's torture for you to use it, it's not actually helping you recover, right? It's more stressful for you and that's not the goal of recovery. Recovery should not be adding more stress to your system. It should be helping you to bring your system out of stress mode in into. Relaxed and recovery mode so that you can actually gain the benefits of all your workouts. Alright, you guys, so that's what I have for you today. If you want, actually I'm gonna go ahead and, make a little shameless plug here for one of our programs because if you are someone that's okay, I understand all of this, but like, how do I actually put it into motion? What do I actually do? You've mentioned a couple of things, but. Can I just follow along with the program? The answer is yes. I have created a 30 day running reset that walks you through all sorts of things, but it definitely gives you mobility work. It helps you understand your running better. It helps you understand strength training. it helps you integrate strength and mobility in a way that is going to support your running. And we also talk a lot about the things that we talk about in this podcast series, with recovery and giving you. An action item each day to focus on. So for example, one day we'll focus on, Getting more sleep, right? And we talk about better ways to get more sleep. And I'll give you like a specific thing so it's not just go to bed earlier. It's, I'll give you like a specific action item that you can do to help yourself get better sleep, fall asleep sooner, stay asleep longer. and that's just one example. there's nutritional things in the program. So we address the four main pillars that we go over in real life runners, which is, the mental game, your mindset, the strength and mobility. Nutrition and nervous system regulation. Okay? So it includes all four of those main pillars in that 30 day program. It's a great way to just reset your running, reset your nervous system, and start getting more benefits from your workouts. So if you wanna check that out, head over to real life runners.com forward slash reset, and you can get all the info there. And as always, thanks for joining us. If you found this episode helpful, please write us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Share the episode with a friend, take a screenshot and share it on social media so that we can help more runners to feel better and get the results that they want from their running. As always, thanks for joining us. This has been The Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 432. Now, get out there and run your life.