The Importance of Recovery, Hydration, Sleep, and Nutrition (But Let’s Be Honest About It)

Recently, I asked our Axis Strength Training community for topics you’d like me to cover here or on the podcast. The first suggestion I received was a big one: the importance of recovery, hydration, sleep, and nutrition. So here we go.

Let’s start with the basics: Recovery matters. In strength training, recovery is everything that happens between your training sessions. When we lift weights—resistance training, strength training, whatever you prefer to call it—we are literally breaking our muscles down. The act of training creates micro-tears in muscle fibers. That’s the stimulus for growth.

But it’s not the training itself that makes you stronger—it’s what happens after. Once you finish your workout, your body gets to work repairing those micro-tears. That repair process is what rebuilds your muscles bigger and stronger. Without enough protein, carbs, fats, water, and sleep, your body can’t repair effectively. We all generally understand this, at least at a surface level.

This is where I might rub some people the wrong way:

Recovery is important, but too many people use “recovery” as an excuse to do less.

Your body is an incredible machine. It will adapt to the demands you place on it. But let’s be honest, going to the gym for an hour a day doesn’t mean you need to “rest” the entire rest of the day, eat thousands of extra calories, and treat yourself to constant massages. That’s where many people get it wrong.

The reality? Very few people are truly overtrained or under-recovered. Most people are simply under-trained. They’re not doing enough work to reach their goals. They think an hour in the gym entitles them to sit the rest of the day. It doesn’t. Our bodies were designed for hard, consistent effort. If you don’t challenge yourself enough, you won’t get leaner or stronger—just softer and less resilient.

Of course, nutrition matters. But to be blunt, most people are overfed and underworked. If you want to know which side you fall on, take a good look in the mirror. These are the brutal facts. Humans can do far more work in a day than most of us want to believe. There are people out there running hundreds of miles, setting pull-up and push-up world records, and performing tens of thousands of reps in a 24-hour span. Those athletes need their recovery dialed in with surgical precision.

For the rest of us? We probably just need to do more work and be mindful of what we eat.

If you’re trying to lose body fat, get stronger, and feel better, the first step is simple: move your body more. Weight train. Go for runs. Do physical labor around your house. Burn more calories. That’s when you’ll start seeing pounds come off and muscle definition start to show up.

Once you’ve built a solid foundation of consistent effort and you’re genuinely pushing your body, then recovery becomes a bigger factor. That’s when you need to fine-tune your sleep, nutrition, and hydration. And of course, if you want to feel good and perform your best, what you eat, how you hydrate, and how you rest all matter.

But before you obsess over every detail of recovery, ask yourself honestly:

Am I doing enough work to reach my goals? 

Am I moving my body enough each day to create change?

If you can truly answer “yes,” then it’s time to do a deep dive into optimizing your recovery. Until then…

Get to work.