Today we are joined by Marcelo Cuenca, an athletic therapist by trade and long-time friend of Mauro’s. Marcelo is here to discuss creating strong foundations for recovery, how to track your workouts and monitor your body’s response, and how movement and mobility impact your ability to train.
Currently based just outside of Ottawa, Marcelo has an athletic therapy business that helps anybody that wants to live an active lifestyle recover from injury or training. As a student at York University, Marcelo studied kinesiology and athletic therapy. The internships afforded to him through his study, including working with the Toronto Argonauts in his final year, lit a fire underneath him and he knew this was what he wanted to do.
From 2010 to 2019, Marcelo worked with professional athletes. One of the commonalities he has found between professionals and weekend warriors is that you can trust the science and physiology to hold true. No matter the client, the basic principles and foundations stay the same. When it comes to recovery and preventing injury, Marcelo shares a few critical tips. Make sure you are getting enough water and macro-nutrients, especially in relation to the activity you do. Also, making sure you are consistent with your workouts and taking care of your post-workout needs is vital to maintain your health.
Your workout is only as good as your recovery, which is why sometimes you might find yourself plateauing. If you have been trying to lose weight, gain muscle, or build strength, look at what your post-workout recovery looks like. Make sure you are taking in enough nutrients and getting enough sleep. Sleep is often overlooked but is a major component of a healthy recovery. Focusing on sleep and nutrition will affect change the most.
Next up is looking at whether or not you are over-training. Look at what is optimum for you and your body. Think about the mental stress of doing too much as well. To track over-training, you can look at many different variables and utilize different technologies to monitor your body’s response. There’s also questions you can answer daily. Are you having trouble sleeping? Do you feel nauseous sometimes? Are you having trouble focusing during workouts? Look at these questions daily so you can track your responses and how you are feeling.
For Marcelo, human movement and mobility is also a huge factor in recovery and training. Technique is everything. How you move can impact your workouts and whether or not you are more prone to injury. Our lifestyles have led us to being more sedentary and using less range of movement. Marcelo looks at bio-mechanical movements to optimize his client’s training. If your joints don’t move, your muscles move in to compensate, leaving your joint unable to retain the same range of motion.
Marcelo and Mauro discuss the best ways to employ static stretching to finish the episode. We hear about Marcelo’s love of cross-country skiing and its benefits, and he goes into a little more detail about his time working with professional athletes.
EPISODE TIMESTAMPS:
[02:45] Marcelo talking School Work and Working in Professional Sport.
[04:47] Recovery Secrets: Good Water Intake and Micronutrients
[06:31] Why will your body start to break down?
[13:31] Doing too much too often.
[14:57] Tracking overtraining
[18:37] Recovery & Injuries – Human movement and Mobility.
[21:14] Emphasis on Proper Movements
[22:22] Walking and running faster
[29:33] Importance of Classic Cross – Country Skiing
[31:50] Working with athletes and starting his own business
QUOTES:
“Be active, any way or form that is, whatever makes you happy because that’s the world that I live in that’s the most effective way-Its longer lasting”
“When it comes to nutrition, good water intake and macronutrients …giving yourself enough of that specific to the demands of your life or demands of your and sports that’s where you can make the biggest impact ”
“When you sleep…the best time to build is the most effective time to recover…If you’re not getting a full amount of sleep you’re losing time to adapt and recover.”
“It is more important that you’re doing your movements correctly and you’re repeating them often even when you have a heavy or power day . You have to emphasize the technique of the movements”
LINKS AND BOOKS MENTIONED
IG : Celo_athetic_therapy
Renaissance Periodization – Renaissance Periodization