Give me all your best recovery tips and routines
I’m really struggling with recovery between table sessions and need some advice. I’m 6 months into armwrestling, I jumped into table time for the first few months before adding any strength or recovery training into my routine, which might have been a mistake. I’m generally pulling with the HWs and SHWs at my club (I’m 6’4”, 225lb) so it‘s a very high level of effort every time, and I’ve always been very gym strong, but armwrestling is very humbling.
Over the last 2 months especially I feel like soreness, pain and weakness has been compounding. I feel it mostly deep in the inside of each elbow where the bicep meets the forearm (like where you’d get blood drawn), often in my brachioradilus, and now I’m getting a lot of pain on the inside of my right elbow joint. This has made weight training between sessions pretty much impossible as my forearms in general are so trashed I can barely open jars the next day, much less hold any significant weight.
I’ve switched to only going to my club every other week to allow for more recovery time. I take 30g collagen and vitamin C before every training and recovery session. I’m now doing recovery work basically every day, where I use belts and a cable stack with light weight (20-30lb) and work pronation, supination and rising movements with high reps just to get blood moving through the joints. I’m also wrapping a red light therapy device my fiancee uses for period cramps around my arm/elbow for 30-60 minutes a day before bed.
Is the only solution to just take more time off between sessions? Just stop pulling max effort all the time and work with the lighter weight guys? Do I just tough it out for another 6+ months until my tendons are properly conditioned? I’d love to be able to incorporate actual proper AW-focused lifting into my gym routine to increase my actual table performance but I can barely work out anything except legs for almost the entire week.
Anything else you guys can recommend in terms of recovery routines would be much appreciated.