Am I the only one?

[FIGHT ON]

My knees hurt coming down just from half way.
When I was young I used to recover in one day, but now it takes four days recovering from Skyline and thats just uphill.

So what is the best way to recover? I've heard if you take a walk or a smaller hike the next day it speeds it up a lot. Sitting around just makes it take longer?

Yes - A walk or small hike does it for me. It only hurts for the first twenty minutes, but my legs still feel heavy.

I tell ya. At this point I'm almost willing to give almost anything to be able to hike long enough and hard enough to have to recover for 4 days. stupid ankle.
wanna trade?

[Zé]

I'd have to look up some research in the field for a good response.

First, depends on what we consider 'recovery'. I don't consider recovery as only dependent on the amount of pain. I also strongly consider the force production ability of the muscle, among other things.

When you get sore (DOMS - delay onset muscle soreness), your muscle has been 'injured' (in a good way) and can't produce as much force as before the exercise. After a few days, the muscle force capability will come back and hopefully will increase from its initial point.

So going out the next day and doing light activity with the sore muscles is certainly a good idea as it will reduce the soreness (due to blood flow removing chemicals, I speculate), but not necessarily speed up the recovery of force production.

What will speed up recovery, and reduce soreness, is doing the activity more often!

If you recover in 4 days, and then do the activity again without waiting, you will have reduced soreness as your muscles have adapted and improved.

If you recover in 4 days, but wait 3 days (till the weekend) to do the activity again, you may or may not get as sore as the first time, just depends.

If you recover in 4 days, but wait 2 weeks, you'll certainly get as sore (or more).