Tips to Help Joint Recovery for Athletes
For athletes, joint pain and injuries can be a major disruption. It can interfere with training, exercising, and keep them from competing. As an athlete, when you’re injured the first thing you’re thinking of is probably the fastest way to heal and get back out there!
We’re looking at tips to help joint recovery for athletes that will help you take care of your body and get back to optimal performance as quickly as possible.
Ways to Improve Joint Recovery for Athletes
Your joints let you do things like bend your knees, elbows, and back. This makes joint health for athletes of critical importance to participate fully in sporting activities, weight lifting, or even just general exercise to stay in shape. They’re essential to movement and support for our bodies during physical activity. Where age may take its usual toll on the body and its joints, athletes put their bodies through more than the average person.
Did you realize there are actually 360 joints in the human body? To be at peak performance, you need to learn to improve joint health and recover quickly. Let’s take a look at some of the best joint support for athletes so you’ll know just what you can do to stay on top of your game:
- Stop overtraining
- Ensure you’re practicing good posture and form
- Use a zero gravity chair to help with joint recovery for athletes
- Stay hydrated at all times
- Be active during recovery (within limitations)
- Keep joints warm
Help Joint Recovery for Athletes by Recognizing the Signs of Overtraining
First up as we explore tips to help recovery for athletes is learning to recognize the signs of overtraining and to stop doing it. Overtraining happens when the intensity of your workout, exercise, or physical activity starts to exceed your speed of recovery.
Overtraining can be particularly hard on joint health for athletes and lead to pain, soreness, or even injury. We aren’t talking about that burn you feel during your workout here. What overtraining is referring to is typically any muscle soreness that lasts more than 48 hours after your physical activity. It’s also frequently labeled as increasing your volume or intensity by more than 10% during workouts each week.
Taking it more slowly is going to be better for your body in both the long and short run. Listen to it and keep yourself from injury!
Practice Good Athletic Form and Posture to Improve Joint Health
Practicing good athletic form and improving posture is about more than just looking good, it’s also important to help joint recovery for athletes. Standing properly and avoiding bad sitting habits are a start, but athletes need to ensure they’re also practicing good form while exercising or being physically active.
If you’re experiencing joint pain, chances are your form is off. When you have good form, your joints are able to recover more quickly because they aren’t being used incorrectly. Regardless of your sport of activity, every athlete should be aware of proper form and techniques while being active. This can help prevent further injury, which could seriously impede your ability to compete.
How a Zero Gravity Chair May Help Joint Recovery for Athletes
A huge part of joint recovery for athletes is knowing how to relax your body and let it heal. Since you’re likely wanting to boost how the body heals itself as much as possible, consider trying out the health benefits of zero gravity chairs.
Daily use of a zero gravity chair may have a profound effect on both your mental and physical health as it improves blood circulation, rehydrates your spine, helps muscles heal faster, and may even help elevate your mood. The bonus features of zero gravity luxury recliners such as massage and heat therapy could take joint support for athletes to another level entirely!
Massage and heat therapy keep your muscles loose and make an excellent addition as part of a post workout recovery routine to improve joint health. They may help treat swollen joints, ease muscle tension, and increase mobility and flexibility.
The benefits of zero gravity chairs for athletes aren’t limited to just improving joint health, either. Better blood flow allows oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to circulate more efficiently and may help improve lung function naturally, reduce pressure on the heart, and help with back pain relief as well as other health ailments. Using a zero gravity chair as part of a post workout routine to help joint recovery for athletes is a game changer.
Joint Recovery for Athletes Requires Staying Hydrated
No doubt as an athlete you’re aware of the importance of drinking water, but we couldn’t talk about tips to help joint recovery for athletes without mentioning it! Drinking enough water helps with joint hydration, a crucial element in the best joint support for athletes. It also helps keep your electrolyte balance and may prevent muscle fatigue related injuries during physical activity.
The average individual should be aiming to drink roughly half their body weight as the number of ounces each day. For example, someone weighing 150 pounds would need to be drinking at least 75 ounces of water to stay properly hydrated.
Athletes, however, lose much more of their body’s water supply due to intense physical activity and require more than that. Some recommendations state that athletes should weigh themselves immediately after a workout and drink 16 to 24 ounces of water for each pound they’re down.
Staying hydrated to help joint recovery for athletes also means knowing when to hydrate. We suggest starting to hydrate at least two hours before strenuous physical activity (whether it’s a workout, game, or event) with subsequent rounds of hydration 30 minutes beforehand, just before, during, and after. While it may seem like a lot, this level of hydration is important to joint health for athletes and may help prevent sports-related injuries.
Being Active During Joint Recovery for Athletes is Important
If you do find yourself injured or sore, you’ll certainly need plenty of rest. To help with joint recovery for athletes, however, it’s also important to stay moderately active during recovery while respecting limitations.
This may mean taking a walk while recovering from a knee joint injury or finding ways to exercise and stretch without overdoing it (check out these full body workout exercises you can do in a zero gravity chair if you’re using one to improve joint health). The important thing is to keep your joints used to moving without further advancing your injury.
Keeping Joints Warm Helps With Joint Health for Athletes
Last up in our exploration of tips to help joint recovery for athletes is keeping joints warm. There’s no clearer way to say it: keeping joints warm helps protect them from further injury.
Similar to how you need to warm up your muscles and joints before physical activity, keeping them warm as part of joint recovery for athletes is critical to the process. While you may consider heating pads for the job, a more thorough method is combining the health benefits of zero gravity chairs with their heat therapy functions to keep joints warm. To keep joints warm during physical activities, make sure you’re wearing appropriate attire, as well.
We hope these tips to help joint recovery for athletes have given you some new techniques to try. Learning how to improve joint health is essential to keeping your body in top shape and being able to participate in physical activities. Remember that staying hydrated, practicing good form, keeping warm, and choosing a zero gravity chair help create the best joint support for athletes!
Learn more about the health benefits of zero gravity chairs for all lifestyles with these resources:
