Last night you stayed late and rolled a few extra rounds, now it's the morning and the hardest thing you'll do all day is get out of bed. Your lower back is stiff, your shoulder feels like it's locked in place and as you raise your hands above your head you hear a half a dozen cracks.
Those extra rounds are necessary though if we're going to continue on our Jiu Jitsu journey and keep improving. The hard part is figuring out that magic formula where you do a little extra without doing so much extra that you can't hit the mats the next day. Is it one extra round, five?
Everybody's body is different and the answer is "it depends". There are lots of factors that go into how sore you feel the next day: Age, how often you train, your strength & conditioning program, diet, and since I'm writing this in 2020 it's possible that "The Rona" closed your school for a few weeks-months and you haven't rolled in a while.
Most of us know about #EverydayPorrada and see guys like Romulo Barral going hard all the time. Most of also wonder "how the hell to those guys train so hard". Whether you really are going #EverydayPorrada or you're just an #OccasionalPorrada kind of guy the key is Recovery.
As you workout you deplete energy stores and you damage muscle tissues, both good things but you need to give your body what it needs to refill those energy stores and repair your muscles while reducing inflammation to truly recover.
That's where Tart (Montmorency) Cherries come in. In a study of 14 college age males researchers found that for the group drinking cherry juice strength loss was at 12% after eccentric exercise while the placebo group lost 30% of their strength. After 96 hours the placebo group still had 12% loss while the cherry juice group actually increased 6% above baseline. *
In another study of 20 marathon runners researchers found that that isometric strength recovered significantly faster in the cherry juice group and that inflammation was reduced significantly. They concluded that cherry juice is a viable way to aid in the recovery of muscle function. **
So how much do you need to take? In both studies the test subjects ate/drank the equivalent of 50 cherries twice a day (12 fl oz). If eating 100 cherries a day seems daunting don't worry about it, you can get it in either capsule or powder form. The dosage you're looking for is between 1,500-2,000mg per day.
To test it out I tried it out on myself for a few weeks and then took a week off. I started to feel the effects by the second day (mostly because I wasn't sore on day 1). I wasn't nearly as creaky when I woke up and going back to training the next day I felt as though I took a few days off. I was able to go hard the whole class and didn't need to slow down from feeling fatigued.
I also found out that tart cherry juice/powder has a positive effect on sleep. I use the Samsung Health app to among other things measure my sleep efficiency and for the weeks when I took the tart cherry juice powder my efficiency numbers increased by 5% on average.
So the next time you're feeling a little beat up or you just want to roll a few extra rounds grab a bowl of tart cherries or add some tart cherry powder to your pre & post workout drinks.
*Kelley, D.S., Rasooly, R., Jacob, R.A. et al. (2006). Consumption of bing sweet cherries lowers circulating concentrations of inflammation markers in healthy men and women. Journal of Nutrition, 136, 981-986
**Howatson, G., McHugh, M.P., Hill, J.A. et al. (2009). Influence of tart cherry juice on indices of recovery following marathon running. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 20(6), 843-852
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