Recovery and it’s importance to your increase in fitness
Often, athletes like to push the envelope, they know how to push themselves hard during workouts, hitting the drills perfectly to make gains in their current fitness. But, did you know that recovery plays even more of a role to your fitness improvements than your workouts? Here is why.
The body cannot recover while under stress. And can only recover from workouts and get stronger, faster, and better through rest, which will allow for adaptation. Yes, you may have stressed the body enough to get that boost in VO2 Max, Neuromuscular Power, Endurance, Sustained Power, or whatever the goal of the workout was to increase, but without sufficient rest, the body cannot properly recover.
For a little while an athlete may get away with constantly pushing the body to new levels, but as intensity or volume increase, if the body is not well recovered something will happen. Usually this presents itself in the athlete either getting a) sick, or b) injured.
Below, I have listed out a number of warning signs which might mean your body is under a lot of stress and you might be over-training.
Sleep
- Broken sleep patterns most nights
- Waking up during the night in night sweats
- Feeling tired during the day when you normally feel awake, and then wired when you try to go to sleep at night
Your Performance
- Feel a high perceived effort while producing less power, a higher Heart Rate, slower pace, relative to your expectations of the workout
- Poor training or racing performance despite a good level of fitness
- Not able to reach those higher paces or higher power zones
- Poor results over and over again
Body and Appetite
- Sore muscles or tender to the touch
- Big changes in your body competition, excessive inflammation, not able to lose body fat when you normally would be, gaining weight despite training more
- Not able to recover from illness as quickly as you normally do
- Frequently getting illnesses like colds, sore throats, or fevers
- If you’ve been to the doctor lately and see declines in Iron, Vitamin D, Sodium, etc
Mind
- Loss of motivation
- Not enjoying your workouts or training
- Feeling down or depressed often
When discussing these issues with a good coach, you should be able to pinpoint exercise behaviors, and create a recovery plan. A coach will be able to organize a recovery plan to help you back down some of your training load without sacrificing fitness, and allow your body to recover from the stress it has been under.
At EventHorizon Endurance Sports we offer unique one-on-one training to help athletes reach their goals, we employ recovery tactics and can help athletes balance their training to get the proper recovery their body needs. If extended recovery is in store, we will work with the athlete to build a plan to help the athlete bounce back from some downtime to get them back on track to their current goal.
Contact us for more information.
Thanks for reading!