The day after leg day is the most awful time to wake up to so how do you recover from it?

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Working out your legs is a vital part of your fitness routine because they hold some of the largest muscles in the body; thus heavy resistance leg workouts are necessary to stimulate hormones that benefit muscle growth. While soreness after a hard leg day is brutal, it’s important to recover properly in order to get your routine going. Need to recover from an agonizing leg day session? Here are a few tips:

Get up and move

While this is the last thing you want to do, getting up and moving your legs will help relieve tension and increase blood flow to alleviate soreness. When you move, your blood flow spreads nutrients and oxygen to your body and the faster they spread, the faster you’ll feel better.

Invest in a foam roller

Foam rollers are great for massaging your sore or tight muscles, especially your legs. It helps break up scar tissues, promotes blood flow, and stretches out sore joints.

Work your joints

Working out your muscles will entail you to loosen up and mobilize the tightest areas of your body. When it comes to leg day recovery, the most ideal routine is to do more squats (yes, that will hurt), cardio, or one that focuses on your quads, hamstrings, and calves.

Stretch

Not only does stretching help release tightness, it also squeezes lactic acid out of sore muscles, allowing water to transport nutrients to the body. The ideal goal of stretching is to give the legs temporary relief and to increase joint movement.

Feed your joints

Protein plays a huge part in building and maintaining muscle so it’s important to get as much of it in a day. Muscle doesn’t grow after you’re done in the gym, it grows during recovery and the best way to treat it is to get enough of your corresponding protein requirements in a day, which is 56 grams for men and 46 grams for women according to Harvard Health Publishing.