The need for Recovery Management

Recovery is key. Recovery is critically important when applied to sports training because without it we do not adapt physically to become stronger athletes. Although in the first instance you may think that recovery is something that is easy to understand in principle, my motivation to write these pages is because many of even the elite seemingly fail to respect the most basic recovery principles within their programmes. Year in year out, when athletes don't reach their goals through constant injury or illness, the main 'silent', un-addressed culprit is most probably over-training. To overcome these serious shortcomings, you need to have in place a carefully thought-out programme of Recovery Management.

If you think that, "injury/illness is a part of sport", I feel sorry for you. Injury and illness from over-use of the body do NOT have to be a large part of your sport. The only reason you have probably thought this is because you rightly see and hear about athletes being ill and injured constantly. I'm a firm believer that there is more to gain in sports performance through Recovery Management than in any other area in sports training.

Social-psychological implications against taking rest

Something in the culture of sport seems to make us think that admitting we need more rest is bad. If you are seen to train everyday for example, then psychologically you could 'look' and 'feel' stronger for it. If you analyse how you really feel though, it most probably comes down to your confidence. For example, if you train everyday you probably feel more confident about your training than if you train say four days a week - I bet! But physiologically speaking are you really optimising your training?

Have you ever considered that you could almost certainly do much less training for almost the same gain, or even have an increase in sports performance, over and above this 'training all the time' scenario? I explain how and why this could be possible, once the basics are understood.

Back to basics

When we exercise, we don't get stronger. When we exercise, we actually break down the muscles and get weaker. The more exercise we do, the weaker we can become and the more susceptible we are, therefore, to 'over training'. For example, if you were to look at the muscle fibres under a microscope after a bout of exercise, all you would see is a mess of wiry muscle fibres, snapped and twisted, curled and clumped. Normally muscle fibres look smooth, long and thin. So as well as the training, we need to recover to build those fibres back up.

When we rest up, we build the fibres back stronger than they were initially. The body has an amazing way to 'adapt'. As you are probably aware, we adapt to our environment: to our food, to illness, to the air, to our water, to a culture, to the cold, to the warmth and to exercise.and this list is not exhaustive! The body therefore responds to a stimulus by adapting to it.

It is also interesting to note that if there is too much of a stimulus, the body seemingly will not adapt optimally. In exercise terms, we could call the 'stimulus' the "load". For example, if the training load is too much, then the body will not adapt optimally. So the body in my opinion responds best by small 'bite-sized loads' that are progressively increased as the body slowly adapts.

The outcome of the adaptation process to an exercise load is called "over compensation". Over compensation is the gain in your fitness from recovering. So it is this combination of exercise and recovery that brings you to your new level of fitness. See diagram 1 below:

EXERCISE + RECOVERY = GAIN in FITNESS

Diagram 1

How do you recover?

If you understand the basic formula above, you will quickly come to the conclusion that if you were able to somehow speed up the recovery process, you would be able to do workouts more frequently. So the next step is to analyse how to recover the fastest.

There are two ways to rest. Either you rest passively and sit in front of your PC, or you rest actively and do some exercise.

Active rest - the most popular theories and practices

The most popular theory behind active rest is that you are moving the muscles enough to clear toxins built up from the bike ride the day before, and in doing so hastens recovery. Another theory is that when your legs are sore the next day, it is because you have lactic acid still lingering within the muscles. To rid the lingering soreness in the muscles, you are told to rest actively.

Athletes' concept of the active recovery duration seems to vary tremendously. A few say they do a half hour ride at low intensity, others say they do between 1-3 hours of riding and some even have intervals (intense workouts) mixed in!

Passive rest - taking a look at a new theory and some practices

But I have a different theory altogether. I maintain that the quickest recovery is through passive rest, and I would like to argue against the points made by the popular proponents of active rest.

When you exercise you break down the muscle fibres. The soreness the next day in my view has nothing to do with lactic acid. Lactic acid is a fluid that is oxidised extremely quickly after hard bouts of exercise. If this is the case, then the pain you experience after exercise is solely due to microscopic fibres tearing. As I have already mentioned, we could view this by looking at the fibres under and microscope to see the damage.

I therefore believe that resting passively is a quicker way to recover than resting actively. This scenario is similar to when you have a blister on your heal. In this example it is clear that the best way to heal the blister is to not walk on it the next day or few days. What happens? New skin builds stronger quicker over the wound, and you can go for longer without the same degree of skin damage. The damaged muscle fibres within the body, in my opinion, take on a similar recovery process as that of the blister scenario.

If you exercise for recovery, then it is similar to walking around on the blister. The blister actually takes longer to heal. Now if this is the case, then cycling after a hard days workout is not really aiding recovery. From my personal experience, I have found that I am fresher after a day off the bike, than if I were to spend that same day riding easily. Yes, when you cycle after a hard day, you naturally feel refreshed, but this 'refreshed feeling within the muscles' does not last long. By evening time, your legs probably feel as tired as they were before you went for the ride.

Now read what most athletes seem to practice as active recovery. They go out for an hour cycling to recover and some go out for what they term, "a two hour recovery ride". To me this is training, not recovery! Yes you add mileage to your diary, and yes you feel more confident before the races that you have "done the mileage", but no I don't believe you have optimised your training.

Continued article on next page...

|home| next page>