If you’ve been trying to renew your focus on your health, exercise is likely to play a major role. You want to get things back into gear, get back the body that might have been lost under a few extra pounds over the past few years, and be a healthier and stronger woman on the other end. However, going hard at the gym or even going light after a long time since your last workout can leave you achy and exhausted, which might not be the best state to parent in. So, what can you do to ensure you’re getting too tuckered out by your workouts?

Ensure you’re drinking enough

During and after your exercise, you need to ensure that you’re getting plenty of water. After all, when you work out, you’ll sweat and lose bodily fluids. If you’re not replenishing the water you use, you might experience heat stress and exhaustion and even feel light-headed. Worse, dehydration will cause you to cramp up while working out, which can hinder your fitness goals. You should follow an online hydration guide to get a better idea of how much water to drink and when to drink it and ensure your workouts aren’t leaving you all dried out.

Get stretching

One of the leading causes of muscle soreness after you have been working out is delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS. This is an entirely natural pain, typically the day after your workout. You’re effectively feeling the microtears in your muscles repairing after the damage you did to them by working out. This process of doing light damage and repairing it is how we build muscle. However, if you go too hard without taking care of yourself, that pain can get pretty rough, and you can also feel much less mobile. To that end, make sure that you follow every exercise with a good stretching session. You want to ensure that you keep stretching the following day and get a little light exercise in. Even just going for a brisk walk will be enough to help keep your muscles limber.

Enjoy a nice massage

Limbering up those muscles is important. Your muscles get more flexible when you exercise and start tightening back up after your workout. However, your exercises can sometimes see your muscles relaxing out of place, which can cause a lot of pain. A little massage therapy or even making use of a foam roller at home can help you soothe these muscles, making sure that there are no knots or spots of great tightness so that everything can relax back into place as it should.

Be mindful of inflammation

A lot of the aching you might feel after a workout is likely to be delayed onset muscle soreness, as mentioned. However, if you’re feeling it around your joints, it may well be inflammation instead. Try cutting out inflammatory foods (such as white bread), increase anti-inflammatory foods (such as green vegetables and berries), and use the appropriate supplements, whether fish oil capsules, Delta 8 gummies, or both. You can take plenty of steps to stop your inflammatory response from kicking in, and they are worth taking a closer look at. Inflammation that doesn’t get treated or relieved can worsen until it becomes genuinely debilitating.

Sink into a cold bath

It might not sound like the most pleasant thing to do, but sinking into a cold bath after an exercise can have tremendous benefits for your body. It’s one of the things that physical trainers and athletes best recommend for reducing muscle soreness, but it also helps to speed up recovery after a workout, cool your body down, improve blood circulation, and can even have mental benefits. While the experience of immersing yourself in cold water is always an unpleasant shock, at first, it can very quickly become great for calming your stress and can even give your mood and energy levels a boost, You can come out of a cold bath, or even a cold shower, feeling great and alert.

Get your eight hours

Eight hours of sleep is most routinely recommended, and it’s important to ensure you get it after stressing your body out with workouts. Chronic fatigue can affect those who have just started getting into working out, especially if you’re doing it 3-4 days a week. Sleep helps to get the blood flowing around the body, taking oxygen and nutrients to sore and tired muscles. It also decreases the production of cortisol, the stress hormone that can cause tenseness around your back and joints. As such, you can relax the tenseness that is often a cause of pain after workouts. Using a sleep timer app can make sure that you’re getting enough REM sleep while also waking up at a point where you’re likely to feel more active for the rest of the day.

Roll with it for a while

If you’re new to working out, the first couple of weeks can feel like hell on your body. You should be able to get through the days just fine, but feeling stiff and achy will likely become a part of your daily life for a while. So long as you keep stretching, stay hydrated, and get your rest days, you should be fine. However, at some point, your body’s response will be nowhere near as severe. Instead, you should get an endorphin rush from working out that stays with you for the rest of the day. It just takes a while for people to reach that state.

A good workout should be tiring and leave you feeling sore the next day. However, you can take steps to stop it from going too far, as recommended above.

These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are not meant to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Before starting any exercise regimen or taking any over-the-counter medications/supplements, you should discuss this with your doctor.