Recovery? That’s boring.

The grind.

It’s what every athlete lives for. We know that to get better, to be the best, we have to push ourselves to the limit.

We embrace the suck, and feel the most accomplished after suffering through a workout that leaves us drenched in sweat, breathless, lying on the floor, and/or puking our guts out.

But what we forget (or never learn) is that it’s what comes next that determines how good we will be.

The recovery phase.

If you ever get the chance to train with some of the best, or hear them speak about what makes them tick, you will see that they take their recovery just as seriously (if not more seriously) as their training.

This phase of training starts the moment our workout ends, and finishes the second we start our next workout. Then repeats again after each following workout.

This is what determines whether your body builds itself up or breaks itself down.

You see, our body is in a constant state of change. We are either building muscle, bone, and aerobic/anaerobic capacity, or breaking it down.

Our workouts are what provides the good stimulus for our body to build, but if we don’t recover properly, then that good stimulus turns into a bad stimulus, and instead of adapting to the new demands that we placed on it, our body starts breaking down.

Training, like every other factor in our lives, is a form of stress that we place on our body. Now we all tend to think of stress as a bad thing (mostly because that is what is always preached to us), but there are good stressors (or eustress) and bad stressors (distress).

If we rest and recover after training, then our body interprets this training stress as good stress, and rebuilds itself so that we can respond to the new demands we place on it in the next training session.

If we don’t allow our body to recover properly, then it interprets our training load as bad stress and releases more cortisol than we want (also released when you feel extremely stressed out for long periods of time or are in situations where you are in danger).

Now if we do this once or twice, it won’t make or break us. No, we won’t get the optimal “GAINZ” that we so desire after our workout, but we will likely be just fine.

Keep this up though, and our body will continue to produce chronically high levels of cortisol, which can cause elevated blood sugar (can you say “diabetus”?), loss of calcium from our bones (which can lead to stress fractures), depressed immune responses (so you get sick way too easily), high blood pressure, LOSS OF MUSCLE MASS, increased fat accumulation, and can even affect your mental capacity.

^BASICALLY, ALL OF THE BAD THINGS THAT CAN HAPPEN TO AN ATHLETE, ALL AT ONE TIME.

So let’s talk a little bit about some simple things that you can do to avoid all of that bad stuff.

To keep it simple, we’re going to touch on active recovery, nutrition, and sleep. We will go more in depth on each of these in future posts.

Active Recovery:

Now we all know about the importance of resting after a workout, but this doesn’t have to mean literally laying around on the couch all day. You can still be active while recovering from a hard workout, you just don’t want to do super intense activities (so maybe it’s not the time to go try out Sky Zone for the first time…).

So if you want to go on a walk, or an easy swim, or play outside with your kids, that’s fine. Just make sure you are moving at a pace to where you can still carry on a conversation.

Nutrition:

Nutrition is by far the most polarized and controversial topic in the fitness and performance industry.

To keep things simple, if your top goal is to perform at your best, then you should not be eating in a calorie deficit. If anything, you should be eating at least as many calories as you burn on a daily basis. If you are a powerlifter or compete in strongman events, and don’t need to worry as much about carrying a little fat, then you can even be eating in a surplus of calories, but there is definitely a health tradeoff if you do it too often.

In pretty much any other sport, however, there is typically an advantage to carrying less fat. In this case, when you are training your hardest, you should be eating at your maintenance calories.

No matter what sport you are involved in, however, you want to make sure you are eating the most nutrient dense foods you have available, instead of empty calories, that way your body is getting all of the macro and micronutrients that it needs to allow you to recover and perform at your best. The bulk of your diet should be made up of fruits, vegetables, and lean meats, and then depending on your individual dietary needs and sensitivities, you can add grains, dairy, and legumes to your tolerance.

Some treats here and there won’t absolutely wreck your performance, but you do want to aim for 90-95% of your diet to come from nutrient dense foods.

Sleep

“Sleep hygiene” has become a key term in the health and performance industries, and for good reason. To keep it simple, sleep is the time in which your body and mind gets a chance to process the events of the day and make the necessary changes to prepare you for the demands that tomorrow brings.

Anytime that you shortchange your sleep, you can basically subtract a percentage of the good things that you did the day before, and exchange them for negative stresses.

In general, when we don’t get enough sleep, our body increases our cortisol levels, causing all of those bad effects that we talked about earlier.

Some easy things you can do to improve your sleep quality include: having a set time that you go to bed and wake up each day (even on weekends), having a set bedtime routine that gears your body up for sleep and lets you wind down from the day, avoiding blue light from electronics in the last 30 minutes before bed, dimming the lights in your room for the last 30 minutes or so before bed, avoiding alcohol before bed (helps you get to sleep, but makes it harder to stay asleep), avoiding eating dinner right before bed, making sure to get outside in the sun a little bit during the day to keep your circadian rhythms in sync, keeping your bedroom cold (the general recommendation is around 65 degrees), and listening to white noise.

Many people have difficulty winding down for bed (I know I do), especially mentally, so some easy techniques are to: read for a few minutes before bed, perform meditation (there are some great apps out there for this now: I’ve used Headspace, or if you have a Peloton membership there are some good meditations on there too), or to do some deep breathing (breathing in on a 4-count, out on an 8-count will help your nervous system wind down).

I know that recovery is definitely not as sexy as working out, but the most successful athletes take their recovery as seriously as their workouts, so maybe they’re onto something?

Try incorporating one or two of these recovery techniques into your routine, and let us know how it goes!

If you are sick of dealing with nagging injuries, or have hit a plateau in your training, send us a message at Peak Performance so we can see how to best help you achieve your goals!