Andy Galpin says something in this conversation that I think most people hear, nod at, and then immediately forget: the workout is not where progress happens. The adaptation happens in recovery. And yet, when you look at how most people structure their lives, recovery is treated as the gap between workouts — not as the work itself.
This reframing is everything. If adaptation occurs during recovery, then your ability to recover is your ability to improve. Full stop.
The DOMS discussion here is fascinating to me. Galpin suggests that a significant portion of delayed onset muscle soreness — that deep ache you feel 24 to 48 hours after a hard session — is not muscle damage at all. It's a neural feedback loop. Your nervous system is responding to the mechanical stress, coordinating an immune response, signaling the body to pay attention to this tissue.
This matters because it changes your relationship to soreness. Soreness is not a report card. It is not evidence that you worked hard enough or that your muscles are rebuilding. It is your nervous system doing its job — processing stress, managing inflammation, recalibrating sensitivity. When you understand that, you stop chasing soreness as a proxy for progress.
What the broader research tells us — and this shows up consistently across the knowledge base — is that the inflammatory response after exercise follows the same hormetic curve as cold exposure, heat therapy, and fasting. The right amount of stress, paired with adequate recovery, triggers upward adaptation. Too much stress without sufficient recovery triggers breakdown. The dose is everything.
There is strong consensus here. Galpin, Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, Peter Attia — they all converge on the same principle. Low-level movement accelerates recovery by promoting circulation and clearing metabolic waste. Active recovery outperforms passive rest. Nutrition timing and electrolyte balance are not optional considerations — they are biological requirements for cellular repair.
The surprising connection I want to draw: this is exactly what contrast therapy does. When you move between heat and cold, you are forcing vascular cycling — vessels dilating and contracting — which flushes metabolic waste and delivers fresh nutrients to recovering tissue. You are doing, mechanically and thermally, what low-level movement does metabolically. You are accelerating the very process Galpin is describing.
Treat recovery with the same intentionality as training. Schedule it. Design it. After a hard session, do not simply stop. Walk. Stretch. If you have access to contrast therapy, use it — 10 to 15 minutes, alternating heat and cold, two to three cycles. Drink water with electrolytes. Eat something with protein within two hours.
The soreness will come regardless. But how fast you move through it, and how fully you adapt, depends entirely on what you do in the hours after the workout ends.
That window is not recovery time. That is training time. Treat it accordingly.