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I found that alternating between hard workouts and "negative exercise" reduces injuries and helps promote recovery. By "negative exercise", I mean yoga, stretching, foam rolling, massage, deep relaxation, or the like. Rather than having strength and muscle-building as the main focus, these negative workouts build flexibility and balance.

yin-yang symbol

Nowadays I do some form of physical activity daily.  I reserve hard workouts like runs longer than 2 miles and weight training to every other day.  I find that 10 min of basic yoga poses (neck and shoulder rolls, side bends, cat/cow, ...) before a weight training session helps reduce the soreness afterwards.

A few hours after the hard workout, once I start feeling soreness, I follow up with a 20-min yoga session. The yoga poses help me survey my body, identify mis-alignments and soreness, and begin working sore spots for recovery.

The next day, I follow up with a more comprehensive yoga and/or foam-rolling session. Foam-rolling essentially is a deep tissue massage that you can do on your own body with the help of a foam cylinder and tennis balls. I hope to write more about it later.

Having this whole-body survey in between hard workouts helps me plan the next workout better: "My shoulders are still sore, so I'll take it easy on shoulder exercises", or "my calves are still sore so I'll do an easy run instead of an interval run," or "the soreness in my legs isn't balances left to right, so I need to pay more attention to form on the next run."

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