Muscle Recovery Is Part of Performance

How to Recover Better, Stay Strong, and Keep Doing What You Love

Playing hard year-round in Florida’s climate demands more than grit; without deliberate recovery, constant exertion eventually turns into an invisible ceiling on your performance. You schedule the tennis match, show up for pickleball, get to the gym, squeeze in the run, or head out for eighteen holes. We tend to pay attention to how hard we worked, how well we played, and whether we’re improving.

What we don’t always think about is what happens afterward.

For years, many of us have judged recovery by soreness. If you wake up the next morning and your legs feel pretty good, you assume you recovered. If getting out of the car requires a small negotiation with your quadriceps, maybe you overdid it.

But soreness only tells us part of the story.

Every match, workout, run, or long active day creates a demand your body has to respond to. Muscle tissue needs to repair. Fuel that was used needs to be replaced. Fluids and electrolytes lost through sweat need to be replenished. And your body needs enough time and resources to adapt to what you just asked it to do.

To stay in the game for the long haul, it’s worth getting as interested in recovery as you are in the workout.

1. Protein & Muscle Repair: Giving Your Body the Signal

As we get older, our muscles can become a little “hard of hearing,” a phenomenon researchers call anabolic resistance. Your muscles need essential amino acids, including branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), with leucine playing an especially important role in signaling muscle repair.

Leucine is one of the essential amino acids found in protein, and it helps tell muscle, “We have the materials. It’s time to start building and repairing.” This matters when you spend your day in a protein desert. 

It is also particularly challenging with vegetarian diets. Not because you can't get enough protein eating vegetarian, but because it's surprisingly easy to become what I jokingly call a 'carbetarian.' Oatmeal for breakfast, a salad for lunch, pasta or rice with vegetables for dinner. Plenty of healthy foods and plenty of calories, but when you evaluate for the amino acids available for muscle repair, they are frequently lacking.

Quick Fix: The Breakfast Protein Audit

If your morning starts with toast, oatmeal or coffee alone, look at how much protein is there. Adding Greek yogurt, eggs, lox with that bagel, or a quality protein smoothie can turn a carbohydrate-heavy breakfast into a much better recovery meal.

2. Replace What You Actually Used

A hard 90-minute tennis match in Florida creates a very different recovery demand from a leisurely walk around the neighborhood. During longer or more intense activity, your body draws heavily on stored carbohydrate (glycogen) to fuel movement. At the same time, heavy sweating drains both fluid and key electrolytes like sodium.

Immediately after a long, hot session, a big meal may be the last thing you feel like eating, and there’s no reason to force it. Start by getting out of the heat, cooling down, and replacing fluids and electrolytes. Once your heart rate has settled and your appetite returns, focus on a balanced meal with quality protein for repair and carbohydrate to begin restoring the glycogen you used.

Quick Tip: Cool Down Before Heavy Food

Immediately off the court, your heart is working overtime to cool you down. Rehydrate with cold electrolyte fluids first, and wait until your core temperature settles before eating a full, solid meal.

3. Magnesium: Important, but It Doesn’t Get to Take Credit for Everything

Magnesium gets a lot of attention in the performance and healthy-aging world, and for good reason. It is involved in hundreds of biochemical reactions and contributes to muscle relaxation, energy metabolism, and nerve function.

However, magnesium has also become the internet's default answer for every muscle issue. The reality is more nuanced.  As a principle, chelated magnesium is more absorbable and addresses systemic needs.  The ‘rock’ forms are primarily used for constipation. 

Here are a few examples:

·       Magnesium Oxide & Sulfate: Less well absorbed by muscle tissue; primarily draw water into the gut, great for bowel motility ('nature’s laxative'), but poor for post-workout athletic recovery.

·       Magnesium Malate: Bound to malic acid, making it well-absorbed by muscle cells to support cellular energy (ATP) production and ease lactic acid fatigue.

·       Magnesium Glycinate: Bound to glycine, highly absorbable and ideal for calming the nervous system, muscle tightness, and evening rest.

It is also important to recognize that acute mid-match muscle cramps are rarely a sudden magnesium deficiency. Cramping during long court matches in Florida heat is far more often driven by spinal neuromuscular fatigue, high sweat rates, and sodium deficits.

4. More Training Isn’t Always More Progress

When a court game plateaus or performance dips, the natural instinct for active adults is often to push harder and add another match, hit the gym an extra day, or double down on drills.

Sometimes more work is appropriate. But often, the issue isn't that your body needs another training stimulus; it's that it hasn't had the opportunity to adapt to the work you've already done.

When demanding court matches and heavy workouts continually pile on top of one another without adequate recovery, exercise ceases to build reserve and simply accumulates fatigue.

Recovery doesn’t mean sitting on the couch for two days. Easy walking, relaxed cycling, light swimming, or mobility work between demanding sessions keeps blood circulating and nutrients moving into healing tissues without adding nervous system strain.

Quick Tip: Be Thoughtful about Stacking Heavy Days

If you play a grueling two-hour court match on Saturday, avoid scheduling your heaviest strength workout or another high-stakes match on Sunday. Placing a light mobility or active recovery day between high-demand efforts gives your joints and connective tissue time to remodel while keeping you active.

5. And Then There Are Peptides…

You can’t spend much time around sports medicine, athletic recovery, or healthy-aging circles today without hearing about peptide therapies. 

Peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as precise cellular signaling molecules in the body, directing processes like collagen synthesis, tissue repair, and growth hormone release. Some peptides have already been approved as pharmaceutical drugs.  In clinical practice, specific peptides like BPC157 and the thymosin derivatives offer exciting therapeutic possibilities for supporting stubborn tendon recovery, joint strain, and connective tissue healing. We believe in peptides and have prescribed them for over a decade! 

However, marketing in this space has moved much faster than the science and the regulatory landscape has become a wild west. Across Florida and online, unregulated peptide vials are being sold by personal trainers, aestheticians, and pop-up vendors claiming products come from a 'clean lab in Miami'. Buying compounds from an unverified source carries real risks: there may be no reliable quality control, no guarantee of what is in the vial, and little meaningful safety oversight.

Peptides are not a DIY hack or a substitute for proper nutrition, hydration, and training balance.  We believe there is a place for thoughtfully selected peptide therapies and have prescribed them in our practice for more than a decade. The good news?  The regulatory landscape continues to evolve, including recent FDA review of several peptides being considered for use in compounding. That's another reason these therapies belong in a medical conversation but not in the world of DIY peptide vials and internet protocols.

When appropriate, peptide therapy requires careful patient evaluation, attention to sourcing and quality, and supervision by a health care professional who knows your medical history.

6. Learn What Recovery Looks Like for You

There is no single wearable score or generic formula that defines whether an individual is fully recovered. What matters most is understanding your own personal baseline.

Pay attention to subtle clues that your recovery isn't keeping pace with your activity:

·       Declining Court Performance: Starting strong but fading noticeably earlier in matches or workouts you normally handle well.

·       Lingering Soreness & DOMS: Unusual muscle stiffness or Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness that persists well beyond 48 hours.

·       Feeling 'Flat': Lacking your usual explosive pop, stamina, or mental drive during warm-ups and initial movements.

·       Extended Readiness Time: Needing several days off to feel ready for a session that used to require only one day.

A single off day happens to everyone. But a sustained shift from your normal baseline is your body's way of communicating. Rather than automatically writing it off as 'just getting older,' a change in your recovery capacity is information worth understanding.

The Bottom Line

Staying active and capable as you age doesn't mean pushing through chronic fatigue. The goal is to keep playing the sports you love and living an active life for decades to come.

Start with the fundamentals: adequate, high-quality protein distributed across your day, replacing fluids and fuel thoughtfully after heavy activity, choosing targeted micronutrients based on personal need, and structuring your training week so your body has time to adapt.

If you notice your recovery baseline shifting and the basics aren't making a difference, our team of health care professionals at Radiantly Healthy MD is here to help you evaluate what your body needs to stay in the game.