Recovery advice for every athlete - Part 1 of 3

There are some critical factors that will assist in the recovery of the athlete or everyday person who trains hard. These are time, nutrition / supplements and mobility. I will cover a one of them in this post and the others later. I will start with the one that I consider the most important and often the most overlooked is TIME.

TIME

When I mention time, I am referring to the time you take to rest between workouts. I will be addressing how you can use different types of rest periods in your training. But first, there is one very important thing to mention early and in bold in this blog, if you are consistently in pain / hurt from training (any kind of training) you are probably training too much or not training correctly. I talk to people every day that have injured themselves with their current training program. In many instances I find that I can help them by making a small change in their training frequency by implementing rest and recovery days.

The Time factor with training applies not only to the number of hours or days between training sessions, it also refers to the number of recovery weeks to training weeks. You may be surprised by how well you would do with your training if your training program included recovery weeks.

Experts like Charles Polliquin, Dan John and Charles Staley often write about taking 1 full recovery week for every 12 weeks of training. I would argue that for the majority of you, you could benefit with ½ week to 1 week of rest for every 3-4 weeks of training. Now for you endurance training junkies, rest doesn’t mean a 40 mile ride or 7 mile run…you get it. Rest means rest. You can consider a low intensity - low duration bike ride in the park having a conversation with your spouse or friend recovery. You can also consider a long walk or a relaxing yoga class recovery as well. But it should be all about taking it easy and keeping your heart rate low and your muscular effort minimal. Running is never considered rest.

Other examples of how to plan your recovery time is below. Many industry experts call this planning your "work to recovery" cycle. Here are a few examples:

3:1 This could be a part of a 12 week cycle where you take ½ to 1 week of recovery for every 3 weeks of training. This would be good for the frequently injured person or person new to training.

4:1 Here you could use a recovery week between each 4 week cycle of training. Most training programs will change a little after 4 weeks and this could be a good time for a break. This kind of works in my simple brain, work 4 weeks and rest 1. This would be good for the frequently injured person or person new to training.

6:1 This recovery interval is better suited for the more mature person training. Someone with a few years under their belt and most likely a person with a good grip on other recovery methods. This is for a person in a more competitive training program that has been training for a while and is not suffering from any type of pain.

9:1 Some seasoned training veterans utilize a 3 x 3 training program. That is they change their program every 3 weeks. In this scenario, planning a recovery week after 3 mesocycles (training periods) is a wise decision. Seasoned training veterans tend to go a bit harder than most but usually have learned when to dial it back and when to rest. This is for a person in a more competitive training program that has been training for a while and is not suffering from any type of pain.


The rest time period (week) is for mobility work, stability work and proper nutrition. You can utilize yoga, massage therapy, chiropractic, rolfing, ART (active release technique) and any other healing modality that you find assists you in feeling better (except medication). Pain medication should never be considered a part of a training program. If you have to take a few Motrin or Tylenol to train, you are in bad shape.

Well, that’s all I have about the Time factor as an aid in recovery. If you are not scheduling your recovery periods, your body will do it for you…trust me on that. The next blog post will be about Nutrition and Supplements with the remaining blog post about Mobility and Stability Work.