 In today's video, I'm going to share five critical recovery tips that you need to follow for maximized performance, muscle growth and overall physical well-being. Stick around for tips number four and five for my favorite recovery strategies to avoid overtraining and keep your gains on an upward trajectory. Let's get into it. What's going on everyone? Tanner Weidman of Barbarian Body, EHP Labs athlete. Now in regards to recovery, what's the real purpose? Why not just crush your workout, go home, eat, sleep and repeat? Well, if you're fine with a degrading return on your gains, elevated level exhaustion and soreness, then by all means, neglect your recovery. However, if you want to train with intelligence, a proper recovery strategy will have you head and shoulders above everyone else in the gym. Recovery tip number one, warming up. Counterintuitive, yes, but a proper warm-up is easily one of the best strategies to ensure you recover from your workouts much more efficiently. And this is because a lot of recovery for most guys is actually dealing with a myriad of slight injuries caused from training when not properly warmed up. The extra soreness you might feel in your lower back or hamstrings after a hard leg workout might not just be from hammering the muscle groups and muscle breakdown. It's likely caused by excess tightness in and around those areas that's been progressively made worse from training for weeks or months on end without properly warming up. Ensure that you're getting proper blood flow through your soon-to-be working areas before the workout to prevent that easily avoidable hamstring pull in the whole of a heavy squat. Your initial warm-up should get your heart rate elevated and blood flowing through the body to warm up the tissues you're going to be stretching and flexing during your sets. From there, I like to use some dynamic stretching, not static cold stretching, that'll dynamically move the body parts you're about to use and get them ready to perform. If you're not going to be performing exercises in a held out, fully stretched and lengthened position with a heavy weight, why would you warm up that way? In fact, static stretching has been found to actually be counterproductive for most workouts. Dynamic stretching will prepare the muscles for the way they'll actually be used in your workouts, which is in movement. As well, using a progressing set scheme will actually help to warm you up to your working sets weight. So start a set of your first exercise with about 25 to 45 percent of your working sets weight for several repetitions. This will progressively warm up the muscles you'll be using in the exact movement pattern that you'll be using them without overloading them with the strain of your full working sets weight. Recovery tip number two, post-workout active recovery. The end of your workout will be the ideal time to attend to a proper recovery strategy. After a hard workout of, for example, your pecs and your delts, you'll be actually more inclined to have a slight internal rotation of the shoulders. As after that workout, your pecs and anterior deltoid are going to be tight from contracting the muscles and pummeling them with grueling exercises. Weeks and months of doing this type of training without the proper recovery can cause significant internal rotation that can lead to injuries down the road when you're performing pressing exercises. So a healthy way to bring back your muscle's natural position can be achieved by recruiting the antagonist muscles at the end of your workout. And by working these antagonist muscles, you'll also be stretching the tight muscles back into a more natural position. So using our example of chest and shoulders still, your recovery strategy could include a few light sets of band pull-up parts or face pulls to stimulate the rear delts, external rotational muscles in the shoulders, and upper back to prevent this internal rotation. It doesn't need to be intense, just a few minutes at the end of the workout will help significantly. Recovery tip number three, utilizing supplements, intra and post-workout to enhance your body's natural ability to recover. I like to personally sip on Beyond BCAAs plus EAAs during my workout mixed with a bottle of cold water. Beyond's formula is loaded with nine essential amino acids that'll improve pain tolerance during your workouts, offset lactic acid buildup to train longer, refuel your muscles to eliminate post-workout muscle soreness, and increase stamina. Beyond will also aid in your recovery by replacing old muscle cells with new healthy ones and rebuild glycogen, which gets depleted during training. You'll also notice an increase to your focus and enhanced mood with a supernutropic blend of Huprazine A and Tyrosine. Recovery tip number four, intelligent retraining. Avoid training the same muscle group intensely two days in a row. You want to give at least 48 hours before you go and retrain a muscle group. If you've just broken down your muscle fibers, going to retrain them before they're fully repaired is essentially pointless. In fact, retraining won't add much of an additional benefit to your muscular growth, making whatever time you spent training without proper recovery a waste of time. And in fact, it can harm your body's overall muscular growth as you're interrupting the most important process required to build muscle recovery. Remember, muscles don't grow when you're in the gym. They actually grow while they're repairing outside of the gym. So space your workouts at least 48 hours apart before you retrain a muscle group for adequate recovery. Recovery tip number five, deloading. Using a full deload week after weeks of consistent training can not only help to aid in total body recovery, but actually keep your muscular growth on an upwards trajectory. And a deload simply means you'll be significantly reducing your training volume and intensity for about a week. Now, some view this as an opportunity to just stop training altogether for a full seven day window, but instead of missing out on potential muscle growth and or fat loss, it's advisable to still train, but do so with significantly less volume and intensity. And when are you going to want to implement a deload? Well, after you begin to see a zero or negative return on your training, either the way you feel and your energy levels, you're not able to progressively overload and you're sort of at a plateau or your numbers are just not going upwards. And in fact, maybe they're going a little bit backwards when it comes to your PRs. So why do we want to use a deload? Simple to prevent overtraining in the body. Overtraining will have a net zero ROI or even negative ROI if you continue pushing through it. I like to do about 60 to 70% of my training frequency and volume for a full seven days on a deload personally. So if you're training four times in the gym, going only three times during the deload week can prove beneficial. Additionally, when it comes to the length of your workouts on a deload, if you're normally pushing one hour long workouts, it's safe to aim for about 30 to 45 minute workouts during the deload, increasing your rest during each set and not performing as many working sets for each muscle. Also focus on not pushing to failure during this time. Leave a few reps in the tank at the end of each set. And that concludes today's video. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to go and grab yourself a tub of EHP Labs' Beyond BCAA and EAAs. They've just released a new flavor, lemon sherbet drop. So give it a try. Don't forget to like this video, comment what you want to see next, and subscribe to the EHP Labs channel so you never miss more videos like this. See you guys in the next video.