These 10 Expert-Backed Tips Will Help Boost Your Running Recovery
Feel better after a workout—and the next time you head out for more miles—with this advice.
If you find yourself slogging during your runs lately, it’s time to examine your running recovery plan and see if you can make some improvements. When following a training plan with back-to-back run days or just many miles a week, recovery becomes crucial to your performance. After all, it’s during downtime that adaptations from your training can take hold and you feel better your next time out.
To help you fine-tune what you do on those days between workouts and long runs, we turned to experts to help create a recovery plan that fits right into your training plan. Steal these tips to bounce back from one workout and dominate the next.
Mallory Creveling, an ACE-certified personal trainer and RRCA-certified run coach, joined the Runner's World and Bicycling team in August 2021. She has more than a decade of experience covering fitness, health, and nutrition. As a freelance writer, her work appeared in Women's Health, Self, Men's Journal, Reader's Digest, and more. She has also held staff editorial positions at Family Circle and Shape magazines, as well as DailyBurn.com. A former New Yorker/Brooklynite, she's now based in Easton, PA.
Susan Paul has coached more than 2,000 runners and is an exercise physiologist and program director for the Orlando Track Shack Foundation. For more information, visit www.trackshack.com.
John Vasudevan, M.D. is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is board-certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Sports Medicine. He is a Team Physician for UPenn Athletics and medical director of the Broad Street Run and Philadelphia Distance Run, and previously for the Rock 'n' Roll Half-Marathon and Tri-Rock Triathlon in Philadelphia. He is a director of the running and endurance Sports Medicine Program at Penn Medicine. Dr. Vasudevan provides non-operative management of musculoskeletal conditions affecting athletes and active individuals of all levels, and combines injury rehabilitation with injury prevention. He utilizes a variety of ultrasound-guided procedures and regenerative approaches such as platelet-rich plasma and percutaneous ultrasonic tenotomy. He sees patients at the Penn Medicine and the Philadelphia Veterans Administration hospital. Dr. Vasudevan attended medical school at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. After his Transitional Year in Tucson, Arizona, he went to residency in PM&R at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and onwards to Stanford University for his fellowship in Sports Medicine. He has been in practice at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012.
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