The Importance of Recovery

Do not underestimate the importance of recovery.

There is a phase that nearly all athletes pass through where they gradually increase the intensity, distance or duration of the workouts they are doing and they stop seeing improvement. What happens next depends on what you understand about recovery.

"Some is good, so more must be better..."

Many athletes believe that they must not be training HARD ENOUGH in order to continue to see improvement. Therefore, they decide that they must need to train more or harder in order to see more gains. Much to their disappointment they continue to stay at the same level or even get weaker. How can it be that more training has resulted in weaker performances? The answer is lack of recovery, more definitely is not better.

While you must place a stress on your body that is greater than it has had placed on it in the past in order to realize inproved fitness, you must also recover from that stress in order to realize the improvements. Adaptation to training stress does not occur during training. Think about that for a second and let it sink in. You can not leave for a 100 mile ride and finish the ride stronger than you began. You must first recover from that ride before you will become more fit.

In the worst cases lack of recovery will eventually result in sickness or injury. Your body will get run down too much and your immune system will become supressed. With running there is also the danger of a stress fracture or other overuse type injury.

Effective training is really a mix of applying stress and recovering from that stress.

Next let's talk about how this paradigm of applying stress and recovering from it is present at multiple levels within structured training.

Recoveries Within A Workout

A well planned workout will have efforts and recoveries. Generally you will have some warm-up phase to prepare your body for the work it is about to do. Then you will do the "main set". You must pay close attention to what the EFFORTS AND RECOVERIES are within the main set. The length and intensity of both the efforts and recoveries are designed to allow you to stress your body in a particular way. Do not cut the recoveries short and don't go too hard during recoveries. If you short change your recoveries you won't be able to perform the efforts at your best. Short hard efforts require longer, easier recoveries. Long moderate efforts don't require as long of recoveries.

Recoveries Within A Week

You can't go hard every day. You need to have easier days prior to hard days to make sure you are ready for the efforts. You may have a couple hard days in a row, but generally short hard efforts will come before longer moderate efforts. Longer easy days also come after harder days. In this order you can complete all of the workouts as described and stress different body systems to become a well rounded rider.

Recoveries Within A Season

Some weeks will be harder and some will be easier. You need to place a stress that overloads your systems and asks your body to adapt. Then you need to provide the recovery time to allow your body to adapt. When leading up to your biggest events of the season you will time a recovery and final sharpening period prior to the big event to make sure that your body has fully adapted to the training stress and you are ready to preform at your peak.

You also need periods of time within the season to back things off and recover more deeply. After the last high priority event of the year it is a good idea to back things off quite a bit.

This training tip also to be featured on: www.CenturionCycling.com/training