Recovery

It is only during rest that your body actually improves.  If you don't allow your body to rest, you will never improve.  Training overloads your muscles resulting in lots of micro tears.  During periods of rest, the muscle regenerates and becomes stronger.

How much rest do you need is the big question.  I like to leave at least 48 hours between hard training sessions.  However sometimes I may deliberately schedule two hard sessions in a row to add extra stress to the body, in which case I would look to follow these with at least 72 hours of easy training or rest.

Active recovery is usually better than passive recovery.  At rest, most of our blood is directed to our major organs such as the liver, kidneys, pancreas, stomach, intestines, etc.  During exercise, a large proportion of this blood is redirected to the muscles instead.  If you keep the exercise to a very low level you will not do any damage to the muscles, but the extra blood flow will result in the delivery of a lot of extra nutrients and the blow will also clear away a lot of waste product from the muscles such as lactic acid.  So very light exercise is better for recovery than complete rest.  I find recovery sessions especially useful between two hard sessions.

Mentally we also need a rest.  You are far more likely to burn out mentally than physically (physically overtraining affects the heart).  Elite athletes who experience heart issues from physically overtraining have typically been doing over 30 hours of training a week for up to 10 years.

Usually I plan each 4th week as an easy recovery week.  I will still train, but every session is easy and optional.  There is no guilt associated with missing a session during a recovery week.  A sure way to tell if a recovery week has been mentally refreshing is if you find yourself getting restless and wanting to train.

After finishing last week with a 14km run and a 160km ride, I am treating the start of this week as recovery.  At the moment I am planning 3 days of rest with the intention of doing a long run on Thursday before getting back on the bike for the weekend.

Today my knee is feeling as good as I can remember since the injury.  I originally planned to do some short recovery runs, but the improvement in my knee has encouraged me to give it more complete rest.  The complete rest should also give the saddle sores, from the 386km on the bike last week, a chance to fully heal.

I have a massage appointment today and a visit to chiropractor tomorrow, so hopefully my body will be in excellent shape to handle the next 3 weeks training leading up to the Long Distance Triathlon in Geelong.  Yesterday I swam about 500m whilst coaching an Open Water Swim session.  I'll probably do an easy swim today and tomorrow I may do a short recovery run before coaching another Open Water Swim session.

Naturally the weather has been perfect early this week (maybe a touch hot) and the rain is forecast to arrive later in the week just as I get back into training.