What Are the Warning Signs Your Body Needs More Recovery?

As I have gotten older, my goals regarding fitness and wellness continue to shift. When I started lifting in my sophomore year of college, I wanted to be strong. I also trained for aesthetics. Once I discovered powerlifting, I focused on training for strength and performance. Now that I’m in my early 30s, the push to continue training for both strength and performance is higher than before. Despite this, I’m more intentional about rest and recovery. My injury at the end of summer 2024 forced me to pause. I leaned into building more body awareness and my recovery routine. In fact, a lot of people may ignore the warning signs your body needs more recovery.

You may think that having a couple of active rest days is enough for recovery. However, it is what you do that determines whether those days were restorative. The warning signs that your body needs more recovery is when you have persistent muscle soreness and notice a decline in your strength performance. This can look like the weights feeling much heavier than the previous weeks. Or an extended plateau and continuously missing reps. In addition, poor sleep quality, mood changes such as feeling irritable faster than normal are a warning sign. Surprisingly, catching colds frequently is another sign as the physical stress has weakened your immune system.

My Motto

Strong, healthy and wellness. That is the motto for this year. The wellness aspect is the one that I chose to prioritise as I had slipped off. My issue is that I want to utilise every minute of the day to get something done. Whether that was a creative task, studying for my pivot or making time for a hobby, I would sacrifice sleep. Then, tell myself that I would go to bed earlier the next day. It never happened. My body gave me continuous warning signs that I needed to rest and let my body recover but I ignored it. One day, I was forced to rest for two weeks to catch up with sleep. Then I chose to create a routine where rest was added each day and relax my nervous system.

It shouldn’t have got to that point. That is why I created that motto and realised that fitness in your 30s has a deeper meaning than aesthetics.

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Why Fitness Recovery Matters More In Your 30s?

Before we get into the warning signs your body needs more recovery, let’s take a moment to explore why is fitness recovery matters more in your 30s. People say that 30s is the new 20s because you have more life experience, more wisdom and more money. That is nothing that I can dispute. However, your 30s is also the best time to start developing self care routines and habits that will last; especially if you didn’t do it in your 20s.

The older that we get, the more that our bodies and our mindsets change. This cannot be further from the truth. In your 30s, life is changing fast and it comes with new dynamics. There are changes with slower muscle growth so you may need to eat more protein. Or have more rest days to trigger to the same repair response like your 20s. Reduced collagen production, hormonal and decline start to show up in your skin. Moreover, accumulated wear and tear from years of movement habits, minor old injuries and desk job lifestyle start to manifest. In addition, there are lifestyle changes from your careers, personal relationships, financial responsibilities that add additional stress that affect your recovery. Of course, we can’t forget that big change: getting older.

These are changes that everyone goes through regardless if you are a strength athlete or not. I’ve gone through a few of these myself. The latest being accumulated wear and tear through my hip labral injury a couple of years ago. This is why both self care and fitness recovery is crucial in your 30s to alleviate the stress.

Warning Signs Your Body Needs More Recovery

Persistence Fatigue and Lingering Muscle Soreness

Have you ever trained and noticed that you still feel aches from your previous training session? You did your static stretching post workout and went for a long walk after work. The next morning, you felt that some of your muscle were still stiff as if you didn’t stretch properly. This is a sign of persistent fatigue and I don’t want you to get that mixed up with delayed onset muscle stiffness (DOMS). These are two very different things.

DOMS usually happens when your body is not accustomed to training or when you take a longer break from it. It resolves itself after 3 to 7 days depending on the damage to the microfibres. Persistent fatigue is ongoing, systemic exhaustion that has built up over time. It cannot be resolved with standard rest such as taking a couple of rest days a week. It can be a signal of overtraining or chronic stress.

There is a reason why a majority, if not all, training programmes have scheduled deload weeks embedded. When I first started training, I had a deload week scheduled every 10 to 12 weeks. After nearly 13 years of training, I schedule them every four weeks. Sometimes, I might take the whole week off from training to focus on sleep, other forms of rest and optimising my nutrition. This is dependent on whether I notice the signs that my body needs more recovery.

Sleeping Trouble: Signs Your Body Needs More Recovery

Sleeping troubles is one of the biggest signs your body needs more recovery. It is an underrated tools in the general fitness industry. Have you ever gone to bed and had trouble falling sleep? Or found yourself tossing and turning throughout the night? Maybe you noticed that you woke up daily at 2am for no reason feeling unrefreshed despite spending hours in bed. Unfortunately, sleeping troubles is not something that is easy to resolve in a couple of days. Sometimes, it requires a complete overhaul of your sleeping routine. Majority of the time, small changes is all you need. These can assist you with waking up refreshed daily and improving your overall quality of sleep.

Overtraining is usually the culprit of why sleeping troubles occur but I firmly believe that most people have never overtrained in their life. Most people don’t push themselves that far in training or in the gym period. As an strength athlete, I believe it is an overload of the CNS that is the culprit as we are working with 65% to 75% of volume for a hypertrophy programme and 80% and more for a strength-based programme.

There is a reason why you see people in their 30s reduce their training days to 3 or 4 days a week. They are giving their body more time to rest. Training is the stimulus and recovery (rest and nutrients) are needed for the adaptation (building the muscle tissue). Proper rest and recovery is extremely important for longevity.

Performance Decline

For me, watching my performance decline is a sign that my body needs more recovery. It usually happens when all things are not equal i.e. I’m dealing with life stressors that affect my quality of sleep and I’m not eating as well as I should. Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with low ferritin. I learnt that is an underlying issue that can affect persistent fatigue, poor sleep and performance decline. When my performance is affected, my motivation and discipline to train shifts, and my focus wavers in the gym. Seeing your performance decline in the gym can usually be caused by four issues. Incomplete adaptation to your programme, hormonal and physical stress; and underlying issues such as medical and nutritional gaps.

To recover from this, I find that doing absolutely nothing during my scheduled rest days is the key. Aiming for 7-9 hours of sleep per night for tissue repair and hormonal regulation. Then, I like to treat the upcoming two weeks as a ‘perfect’ training week where I’m on point with nutrition, hydration, sleep and self care. Most times, I just need to re-prioritise the things that truly make a difference to bounce back my performance in the gym.

Mood Changes

Mood fluctuations and irritability can be signs your body needs more recovery but I wouldn’t rely on this as the only indicator. As women, this can be a sign of other hormonal changes such as PMS, puberty, pregnancy, postpartum adjustments and even peri- and menopause. There are also lifestyle changes that can affect this such as career changes, financial and medical responsibilities. I suggest looking into other areas of your life that have changed to determine whether this is truly related to recovery needs.

Frequent Aches Are Signs Your Body Needs More Recovery

Before my injury, I was aware that wear and tear was a thing in fitness and strength sports. However, I didn’t think it would affect me until later on in life. As we have become more sedentary as a society and a majority of us work desk jobs, frequent joint aches, tight hips and glute muscles are issues that are showing up earlier and more frequent. Ignoring these signs can have a bigger effect in the long run.

If you do work a desk job, aim to increase your standing hours, do stretches by your desk and sneak more movement during 9-5. Take your time with stretching after your training sessions and hold each stretch for at least 40 seconds. In addition, make sure to foam roll or use a theragun massager at least once a week. Something that I am about to start are deep tissue muscle massages during my deload weeks. I hope to see an improvement and reduction of these aches by Spring.

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I felt that this post was timely as we have entered the last few months of the year. As I have made a full recovery for my injury, I want to share the warning signs that I encountered and ignored so you don’t make the same mistakes too. Apologies for the late posting, I’ve been in the Serengeti for the past couple of weeks and the internet has been a little spotty. Make sure to hit that subscribe button to join the community and never miss out on a post. Find me on Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok for more powerlifting and wellness content.

Until next time,

Folakemi