The Most Important Component Of Any Training Program
Recovery—The Most Important Training Factor
Regardless of what your training goals are, how many days a week you train, or what cool, sexy program you are following to achieve those goals, one thing will set apart your results more so than any other factor—recovery. Without it, you will not only miss out on all those gains you want but will more likely than not sustain an injury.
Recovery—Why So Important?
Proper recovery from training is an essential part of making progress. You cannot make optimal physiological adaptations if you do not allow your body to recover from your training sessions. There is no arguing this point. Below is a chart of an SRA (Stimulus-Recovery-Adaptation) curve. The red line shows the training stimulus, the blue line shows recovery, the purple line shows adaptation, and the gray line across the bottom shows your starting baseline. This chart depicts how the body adapts to training stimuli and thus progresses you in your training.
Very simply put, the body is provided with a training stimulus or stressor greater than what it is currently capable of handling, it RECOVERS from this stressor, and then it adapts to be able to handle the stress previously incurred. If you do not recover from training, you slowly start digging yourself into a hole that is extremely difficult to escape. Instead of trending upwards on the chart, you will begin to trend down, meaning you are actually getting worse. Eventually your body will be broken down so much from the training stressors that an injury will occur. Any basic training program will be based around the principles on this chart, but it is your job to make sure you are recovering properly and thus ready for the next session.
So how do I recover from training?
1. Sleep!
Sleep is without a doubt the most important and most powerful recovery tool at your disposal. It is during sleep that your body actually goes through most of the recovery process. Without enough sleep, it is almost impossible to recover optimally from training, regardless of what else you do to help stimulate recovery. A good general framework for sleep is 8-10 hours per night. Now, every human being is different, and some people may need way more sleep while others can get by with less, but for most, 8-10 hours is great place to start if you want to optimize your recovery and adaptation.
2. Eat!
I have found that most athletes and people in the CrossFit world do not eat enough to support their level of training. Make sure that you are getting in enough calories to sustain your body frame and level of activity. This is going to vary widely from person to person, depending on their size, age, lean muscle mass, and daily activity levels, which will include the type of job they have. For example, a construction worker will burn more calories on the job than an office worker, so if everything else were the same, the construction worker would need more calories based solely on their job. Without enough calories and the right amounts of macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats) your body will not be able to properly recover. During training, you create lots of tissue damage and deplete your energy stores. If you do not feed your body well, it will not have the necessary building blocks to repair that damage and make the tissue stronger, nor will it be able to replenish the used up energy stores. Also, fat is essential for hormone production, and your hormones, among many other vital things, help you to recover. I will have another blog dedicated specifically to nutrition, but for now you can use a simple and free fitness app that will give you a suggestion for total caloric intake based off of your metrics. This is a good enough place to start. If you want a more specific approach to optimize your nutrition, contact us at Unstoppable Athletes through email (jon@unstoppableathletes.com) and we can talk with you about the nutrition services that we offer.
3. De-Stress!
First things first—stress is not an evil monster that you must avoid at all costs. The negative consequences of stress are directly related to the AMOUNT of stress, real or perceived, placed upon a person. The body has no way of differentiating stress; hard physical training is a stressor, extreme temperatures are stressors, mental and emotional disruptions are stressors. Regardless of the cause of the stress, the body reacts in the same way. The sympathetic nervous system is activated, stimulating your fight-or-flight responses, which lead to a series of hormonal actions that, in times of need, help you to survive. A certain amount of stress is not only good, but necessary. Training, in and of itself, is a stressor, and without it you will not grow, develop, and achieve the goals you seek. The problem with stress comes when there is too much or the person is stuck in a state of chronic stress. Basically, this chronic stress keeps you in a state of sympathetic nervous system activation, which is not conducive to recovering from training. You need to swing the pendulum back towards parasympathetic nervous system activation, which will allow all of your internal recovery mechanisms to work at full capacity. A more in-depth blog on stress is coming soon, but for now make sure there is time in your day for you to relax and do things that you enjoy (other than training) that help you to calm your nervous system. Breathing is a very powerful tool in regards to controlling your stress response and even something as simple as reading fiction can help you to de-stress, which will help you to better recover.
Key Takeaways For Better Recovery
Recovery is without a doubt the most important training factor in any physical training program. Very simple guidelines to help you better recover are:
Sleep 8-10 hours a night.
Make sure you are eating enough.
Take time out of every day to de-stress and get out of your chronic stress state.
Following these guidelines will help to ensure you are able to recover properly from your training and will have you on a much faster track to success. Starting today, track your sleep, track your food, and make sure you take time to de-stress from everyday life. Then, adjust accordingly.
—Coach Jonathan
By Jonathan Poole at Unstoppable Athletes
https://www.unstoppableathletes.com