Fight Science Made Simple | FSMS #3 - Cold Plunges, Saunas & Massages: What Recovery Methods Actually Work?

Most fighters think recovery is all about cold plunges, saunas, and massages, but those are just the extras. Real progress happens when you master the science of recovery for fighters — how your body adapts, rebuilds, and comes back stronger after hard training. Without it, you’re headed for burnout, injuries, and plateaus.

In this episode of Fight Science Made Simple, you’ll learn:

• Why recovery is where real gains happen.
• The 5 stages of training stress and how to avoid overtraining.
• The Recovery Pyramid and why sleep and nutrition come first.
• How to use HRV, resting heart rate, and recovery data to train smarter.

Whether you’re an MMA fighter, BJJ athlete, or martial artist, mastering recovery is the key to training harder, preventing injuries, and performing at your peak for years to come. 

What is Fight Science Made Simple ?

Fight Science Made Simple is for fighters and martial artists who want to train harder, recover faster, and stay on the mat for life.

Each week, we break down strength & conditioning, nutrition, recovery, and mindset into straightforward strategies you can actually use in training. Simple, practical, and backed by real fight science—so you can keep chasing your potential, performing at your peak, and becoming the fighter you’ve always wanted to be.

 Welcome to episode three of the Fight Science Made Simple podcast. I'm your host coach Adam Snyder. I'm a lifelong martial artist, active MMA fighter and performance and recovery coach. I've dedicated my life to helping fighters train harder, recover faster, and stay on the map for life. And we do this with science-backed data-driven strategies.

In today's episode, we are talking about recovery, all things recovery. What is it? Why is it important? What are common misconceptions about recovery and what are action steps that you can take today to improve your recovery and see immediate improvements to your game? I hope you're excited, like the title of this podcast suggests, my goal is to make this information as simple as possible.

I wanna jam pack it. With value, but I wanna also make it actionable. So today you can start seeing improvements. So to help me make more of these podcasts and reach more people, I would love it if you could do two things. The first is follow the podcast. That helps a lot. And the second thing is share it with your training partners, with your teammates.

The more fighters and martial artists that we can get this information in, in the ears of the just better place the sport is gonna be, and the more success people. Are going to have, which is what we want. So I really appreciate you for doing that. Without further ado, let's jump into episode three of the Fight Science Made Simple Podcast.

Okay, so today, like I said, we are talking about recovery. Recovery is super important because we are only as good as the work that we can recover from. As a fighter, you don't make gains from the hard work that you're doing. You make your gains from how you recover from that work, and so. It's super important for leveling up your performance, but recovery is also super important, important for avoiding injury and burnout because if you're just training, training, training, going as hard as you can without proper recovery, eventually your body is going to burn out.

And break down. And so if we want to be successful at the sport and we want to be successful for a long time, not just a short, small window, but for a really, really long time, mastering your recovery is a super important thing. And the first step to mastering your recovery is first understanding. What recovery is at the simplest level, recovery is just your body's ability to get back to baseline normal health.

So if you're unhealthy or you're damaged, or you're sick, or you're hurt, you recover and then you get back to normal and you no longer have those ailments or sicknesses or issues. That's a very basic understanding. Of recovery to take it up one more notch. It really comes down to stress how well our body manages, adapts, and then recovers from stress.

And as humans, as fighters, we are dealing with stress all day long and stress isn't. Inherently a bad thing. Just too much stress is what leads to over training under recovering, if we are not putting the proper recovery protocols and measures in place. And what's really interesting is that your body doesn't know the difference between stress from a hard sparring session or stress from a hard day at work.

And so. If all you're doing is focusing on training hard, training hard, training hard, training hard, but then you have other stressors in your life, which you probably do, whether it's work or relationships or family or sitting in traffic, whatever the craziness and challenges that life throws at you, it's putting stress on your body.

And if you don't have a good strategy for managing that stress, that's when we start to lead to burnout. That's when we start to lead to injury, and that's when it really starts to impact our game. But. Like. Anything. There's a scale with these things and there's also a scale to your stress levels and how you recover from different levels of stress.

There's actually five different levels that are really important to understand. Uh, the first level you have to understand is under training. This is just where. You're not doing enough, there's not enough stress on your body to cause any kind of performance gains. 'cause what we want to do is we wanna put just enough stress on our body that our body isn't used to.

So then we have to adapt to that stress and then we get better If. Any of you're musicians, it's like you play guitar and what happens? You're putting stress on your fingers. They hurt at first, and then they build calluses because you're putting stress on your body and then your fingers get stronger.

They adapt to the stress that you're putting it under, and it goes through the same as you as a fighter. You're putting your body through stress, whether it's just build strength or power or cardio or injury, resilience. You have to put stress in your body first, and then it adapts and it grows. And so if you are not putting enough stress on your body, you're actually.

Under training and you're not going to get any better. The second level to that is training where you have proper recovery, you have a decent amount of stress, and you're going to see some performance gains. The thing about just training though is that at a certain point, your body is going to adapt to that level of stress.

So let's say you are at a level one to what your body can handle in stress, and you put it at level. One and a half. Well, you chill at level one and a half for a couple months, maybe even bring it to level two for a couple months and you just stay there forever. Eventually your baseline becomes level two.

And what was once just training now becomes under training. 'cause you're not. Introducing new stresses on the body. So to really get the most out of your performance and recovery gains, we have to hit a sweet spot. And that's number three. We call this functional overreaching. This is where I want most fighters.

Most athletes to live because let's say your baseline of stress is like that. Number three, training intensity. If all you do is stay at number three, like we talked about, you're never going to get any better. And so what overreaching is is just going a little bit over our baseline. And so if level three is our baseline, maybe we go to level three and a half, or maybe we go to.

Level four, and we're overreaching. We're putting more stress on our body than what our body is used to. And by putting our body through that level of stress for a certain moment of time, for a certain length of time, and then pulling back and allowing your body to recover with a deload week or a rest week or a recovery day, what happens is this really interesting.

Phenomenon in the body called super compensation, where you build the stress, you stack the stress on your body, and then you pull back and you remove stress and you actually allow your body to recover and heal. And this slingshots your baseline forward. So where your baseline was once, level two. Now because we overreached reached reach, now our baseline is over level three and we wanna repeat this process to keep growing and growing and growing.

But what happens, and this is what. A lot of fighters experience is level four in our scale, is what we call non-functional overreaching. And so if we're, let's say at that level two, and we're overreaching two and a half overreaching. To three, overreaching to four, and we keep putting more stress and stress and stress on the body, but then we never give our body those recovery days.

We never give our body those deload weeks. What happens is you're just stacking and stacking and stacking and stacking the stress on your body. You're never going to super compensate and you're never going to make gains. This is honestly this functional, excuse me, non-functional overreaching is also what we can call under.

Recovering, you're just not recovering from the stress that you're putting your body through. And so you're not going to make performance gains and you may even get injured or you may even burn out, and this is what we're trying to avoid. The next level and the final level, level five from that is what we call over training.

This is the absolute extreme. Typically when fighters and athletes talk about, oh yeah, I'm over training, they're typically not over training. They're typically non functionally overreaching. They're under recovering. Um, it's very, very, very challenging to overtrain. That being said, if there was any sport where athletes would overtrain it would be fighting because you're putting.

So much stress on your body and you are overreaching for so long without any form of recovery that not only does your body start to break down, you start to burn out, but you also start to lose performance gain. You start to go backwards because you're putting way too much stress on your body. And so what we wanna do, like I said, is we wanna find that sweet spot.

We wanna know where our. Baseline stress levels lie. We want to functionally overreach. We want to go over that BA baseline by just enough where we're not destroying our bodies. And then we want to make sure that we're strategically implementing recovery days. Recovering weeks deload time to allow our body to super compensate, to make adaptations to the stress that you're putting it through, so you can consistently make gains while avoiding burnout and avoiding injury.

So that's as basic and simple as I can make the concept of recovery and stress management. Um. If it was a little confusing, that's okay. It still confuses me sometimes. Go back and listen to this section a couple times and really ingrain it in into your mind. Um, but now you should have a, at least a basic understanding of what recovery is and why recovery is important and how it works.

Now that you know those things, we can talk about how to properly recover and some common misconceptions about recovery, because I think. Even though recovery is something that more and more fighters are talking about, a lot of fighters still don't understand what it means to properly recover. Uh, when I listened to fighters talk about recovery, I'm dealing with these nagging injuries.

I'm just tired. I'm burned out all the time. Uh, I've been pushing really hard. It was a tough week. Excuse me. You know all the common things. The first things they go to is, ah, I need to hit the sauna. I need a cold plunge. I need to get a massage. I need to go to the chiropractor. I need to see my physical therapy therapist.

I need to foam roll more. I need a cortisone shop. I need some peptides. I need some dry needling. And they go to all of these passive modalities of recovery and. What these passive modalities of recovery do is they, they treat symptoms, but they don't actually fix the root cause of what might be causing your recovery issues, and they don't really improve your recovery.

They just make you feel better in the moment, which can be. Beneficial in the short term, but it's almost like slapping a bandaid on the issue without addressing what is actually wrong and wondering why you're not getting any better. And so the way that I like to think about approaching your recovery, I like to think about it like a pyramid.

Okay? And at the top, the very tippy top of. The pyramid, the thing that impacts your recovery the most is those passive modalities, the sauna, the cold plunge, the massage, the dry kneeling. Those are the things that impact your recovery the most. However, those are the things that fighters focus on the most when it comes to recovery, and they have it backwards because if all you're doing is focusing on your passive modalities of recovery, and you think that's doing enough for your recovery.

It's kind of like going to an ice cream shop and just ordering a bowl of sprinkles, right? Who, who would do that? Nobody would do that. And so you're just getting a bunch of sprinkles that you're having a, a very insignificant impact on your recovery. And what we actually need to do is focus on the base and the bottom, and the foundation of the pyramid first.

And at the very bottom of the base, the very foundation of your recovery is sleep. Uh, it's not sexy, it's not exciting. It's super basic and it's super boring, but sleep is, it's like a legal performance enhancer. It is the number one best thing that you can do for your recovery, and you can make changes to your sleep right now to start seeing better results to your recovery.

I tell the athletes that we coach, sleep eight hours a night, go to bed the same time, and wake up at the same time every single day, make it dark. Make it cold. Put your phone away, relax and get off social media and, and get away from stressful, stimulating things that, that come into your life, like playing video games or arguing or obsessing over the news.

Calm down, relax, let your body. Just shift into a space of recovery and then sleep. Because sleep is where your body heals. It releases hormones, it rebuilds, and it resets your body. So you can consistently make progress day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. So the very first thing, if you're struggling with recovery, prioritize your sleep first.

The next level. To the pyramid, the the second foundational piece that cannot be missed is your nutrition at the Fight Science Collective. We call this performance nutrition because eating for performance is very different than just eating clean and healthy. But your nutrition is so important because what you eat doesn't just fuel your performance, but it also fuels your recovery.

And so. When we first start working with a client and we're dialing in their nutrition, we first wanna make sure that they're in the right weight class. They're fighting at the right weight class, which means their walk around weight is at a healthy range away, typically 16% or lower away from their fight weight.

Then once we identify what weight class they're fighting in and where they are in relation to that weight class, then we identify what our goal is. Are we maintaining weight? Are we peaking for performance? Are we cutting fat? Are we starting to cut to make weight? We have to understand where we are, and then we have to calculate how many calories that person burns in a day.

We call this total daily energy expenditure, then we can determine how much they need to eat to achieve their goals. They need to lose weight. They need to be in a deficit. If they're maintaining weight or optimizing performance, they're eating at maintenance. Excuse me. If they need to gain weight or gain muscle or they're recomp and going up a weight class, they need to eat in a surplus.

It's very important. Then we can talk about what foods to eat. We want lean proteins. We want good carbohydrates. We want rice. We want sweet potatoes. We want fruits. We want pasta. We want lots of fruits and vegetables. We want good, healthy fats like avocado and and o oils like olive oil and nuts and seeds.

We wanna make sure that we're eating. Lean whole nutrient dense foods. And then we want to eat our foods at the right time. We want to time them around training. Um, actually last week's podcast, episode two was all about this, uh, food timing and meal timing, when and what to eat before training, so you can go back and watch that episode.

Um, we also advise that our clients eat a gram of protein per pound of body weight, and they're dialing in their nutrition, they're weighing themselves before they train. Weighing themselves after they train. Replenishing the water loss with water and electrolytes. Really important. You're not just drinking water, but you're also replenishing with electrolytes.

Like all of these things are so important. So you have to get your sleep down. You have to get your nutrition perfect. Then you have to get your training. This is the next foundational level of the recovery pyramid. When are your hard days? When are your light days? When are your medium days? What is your strength and conditioning like?

Are you targeting your weaknesses? Turning them into strength? Is your program changing and evolving as you wouldn't change and evolve? Is it adapting to the different phases of the fight cycle that you're in? Is it built around your sport and your competition and your equipment access and your experience level only injuries that you have?

This is really, really, really important because if you're just doing random workouts that your coach tells you to do, or you're watching YouTube videos to get workout ideas, or you're using chat GPT, or you're just going to the gym and lifting. Randomly and for cardio, you're just going for runs or doing hit circuits and training really, really hard.

Then what's happening is you have no dose management to your stress. You're just putting as much stress or random stress on your body as possible, and when you overload your system with stress, it's very difficult to manage that stress, and this is where you dip into that non-functional overreaching, that under recovery phase.

And so it's so important to have a well. Periodized science backed plan to training that. Put stress on your body strategically so that you can stay within that functional overreaching range. So important. The next level up is supplementation. Uh, really important. Most supplements are bullshit, but once you have the three foundational layers done, then we can add supplements.

Things like creatine are great. Beta lanine, whey protein, multivitamin, you know, the, the basics work best. But again, these don't come in until the foundational layers are hit. And once all of those boxes are checked, then you can sprinkle your sprinkles on top and you can add your passive modalities, the sauna, the massage, the cold plunge.

But if you are not dialing your sleep, nutrition, and training strategy, it doesn't matter how much of the passive modalities you do, they are not going to have the significant impact. They may make you feel better in the moment, but you're gonna keep struggling with the same injuries. You're gonna keep struggling with the same burnout, and worse it's going to get.

Worse and worse over time, the, the more that you push it. So let's take a pause on the passive modalities and really focus, and this is what we do at the Fight Science Collective. We dial in our client's sleep, nutrition and training strategy by creating a science fact personalized protocol for them. And so if you wanna make it in the sport, you have to do the same.

Those things have to be dialed in. Okay? Really, really, really important to dial those in. Um, those are really important strategies to recovering. You know what recovery is. You know why it's important. How do you gauge if you're actually recovered or not? Because I know it can be hard to tell. Some days you feel good, some days you feel beat up and burned out.

When should you just push the pain? You know, maybe you're tired that day and maybe you had a long day at work and it's still a sparring day. Should you spar harder that day? Should you take off that day? Should you sleep in? It can be. Really, really challenging without data, and this is why we are so obsessed with data at the Flight Science Collective because your body, specifically your heart, is constantly sending signals to whether you are recovered and managing stress well or under recover and managing stress.

Poorly, your heart is like your body's check engine light. And so we track three really important data metrics at the Fight Science Collective. Uh, the first is heart rate variability. This basically is a reading of how your body manages stress. It it reads your nervous system, whether it's recovering from stress well, or it's not recovering from stress well.

It's really hard to say what your HRV should be because it's such an individualized number. What's more important is looking at your trends. So if you wear something like a whoop, this is what we use with our clients, or an aura ring, and you have a couple months of heart rate variability data, then you can.

You can monitor your trend line and if for a couple days or weeks, your heart rate variability is 10% lower than it normally is, we want a high HRV. If it's lower than normal for a good amount of time, this could be a sign that you're overreaching. Non functionally overreaching or maybe even over training.

The same thing for resting heart rate. We want lower resting heart rates. Elite athletes, we want in, in the high forties, mid forties to to low fifties, but it's the same as your heart rate variability. You can use a biometric tracker like whoop to. Monitor your heart. Resting heart rate data, so you have trends for an extended period of time, a couple months, and when you see elevations in your resting heart rate, so your heart resting heart rate is higher than normal.

This is an indicator that you're under recovering or you're over training. We also like to use heart rate recovery. Heart rate recovery is how quickly your heart can come down from a level of high stress back to baseline. Uh, we typically, and our clients like to see a heart rate recovery of 50 to 60 beats in a minute.

So let's say your heart rate is up at 180 after a heart sparring session, it drops all the way down to one 20 in one minute. This is incredible. We track these trends with our clients. If there are a couple days or a couple weeks where your heart rate recovery is smaller than normal, let's say you typically recover 50 beats in a minute, and now you're recovering 30 beats in a minute, you may be undercovered or over training.

And so it's really important that we're monitoring these trends and at the end of the day, this data is just information, but it's not the end all, be all. It's better than going off feelings though. Our feelings are still important, however, so we want to use our heart rate data in conjunction with how we feel.

So you might be looking at your heart rate data and you might feel great, but your HRV might be plummeted. If it's just a day or two, I would say keep training, but if you're feeling okay and your HRV is plummeted for a couple days, a week, two weeks. Might be a sign. Okay. You need to do something on the other side of things.

Let's say you are feeling trashed, but your heart rate data is great, and your heart rate data is great for a couple days, a couple weeks, then you probably just have to suck it up and go to training. If you feel like trash and your data's trashed, then this is a great sign that you need to prioritize recovery a little bit.

And we love heart rate data and we love tracking data because once we put our sleep. And nutrition and training plan, in plan in place. The data tells us if what we're doing is working or not. So if a client, you're going to have a red or a yellow day throughout the week. This is normal because we wanna be functionally overreaching.

We wanna put just enough stress on our body. So we train hard, train hard, train hard. We have a red or a yellow recovery. Great. Let's pull back, let's deload, and then we should shoot up and hit green for a couple days. Obviously we want more green days than red or yellow days, but this is the game, right?

We're constantly balancing how much stress we're putting on the body and how we're recovering from that stress. Super, super, super important. So quick little summary. Hope you guys are loving this. I, I love it. Recovery is how your body can heal, how your body goes from a state of disruption. You're leaving homeostasis back to a normal baseline.

There are five levels of recovery that we're looking to understand under training. There's not enough stress on your body to cause any kind of adaptation training you. You have a good amount of. And recovery. Uh, and you will make progress, but you probably don't have enough stress to make significant gains.

That's where functional over training comes into play. We're shooting over our baseline in stress just enough where our body can. Grow and get better, but we're also not pushing it so far where we're, we're breaking down, we're pushing and then recovering through and using the concept of super compensation to slingshot our performance forward.

Then we have non-functional, over training is also under recovery, where you're putting too much stress in your body without proper recovery, so you're not making gains and you're actually breaking your body down misleads to injury. And burnout. And finally you have overtrained. This is where you have so much stress on your body for so long, and you're overreaching for weeks and months that your body breaks down and gets injured, and you actually start going backwards.

You start losing progress and it takes. Weeks, maybe even months to recover from this and get back to baseline. Uh, really important when you're prioritizing your recovery. Think about that recovery pyramid. Get your sleep and your nutrition and your training routine dialed in. Then you can sprinkle passive mod modalities and supplements on top of that to add a little oomph, but only add those in once the other three layers are dialed.

Use data like heart rate recovery and resting heart rate and heart rate variability to. Monitor if you're recovered or not, to use data and facts and not feelings to make educated decisions about your training. And if there's anything that you can do today to start seeing immediate improvements to your recovery, the first is to prioritize your sleep, and the second is to have a positive relationship with taking days off.

I always tell our clients, 'cause I used to struggle with this. I used to feel antsy or like my opponent was out working me or I was a pussy. If I. If I, if I took days off or I felt like I needed days off, I wasn't tough enough, and this is. A really, really, really destructive mindset to have. So a mindset that I shifted in myself first and then we shifted in our, I do with all of our clients, which is really important, is that you need to have confidence in your recovery days, your recovery days, your rest days are strategic and part of the plan, and they are what gives you the edge over your competition, not just working harder.

We need to work harder. And we need to recover smarter. So we need to shift that frame, do those two things, change the frame, create a positive relationship with rest days in recovery, and start fixing your sleep. Do those two things. You're gonna see better recovery. Make sure you check out last week's episode if you wanna learn more about meal timing.

But that's everything. That's today's episode. I try to make it as short and sweet and as valuable as possible if you got a lot out of it. Please, please, please, please, please, it helps so much. If you share this with your training partners, you share this with your teammates, follow the podcast. We're releasing brand new episodes every single week, and until next time, I'll catch you later.