Someone asked me to comment with
my thoughts on recovery. In the training process it is during recovery when the
training adaptation occurs. There is a unity of work and rest, essentially a
yin and yang. It is impossible to talk about training without considering
recovery both intra training session and inter session. Inadequate recovery
will not allow the training adaptation to occur and this eventually leads to
injury or overtraining. In my opinion there has been way to much focus on
external means of recovery and not enough on proper planning and training design.
I heard one coach of elite athletes in track & field say that he needed one
hour of therapy for every two hours of training. That is ridiculous, if you
need that much work on recovery, then something is serious wrong with the training!
Certainly external means of recovery are necessary and viable if used correctly
and timed properly within the training cycles. I think to understand recovery you
need to understand the concept of stimulus threshold. Stimulus threshold is the
optimum workload necessary to elicit an adaptive response to the particular
physical quality you are training. Not maximum but optimum. Then you need to
consider the interaction of all the components in training and recognize that
there are different times to adaptation for different physical qualities. Once
you have done this then you plan the recovery so that the various curves of adaptation
will coincide at the desired time. Plan the work, work the plan and remember that
after the work the rest is easy.
3 Comments
Jonathan Hewitt ATC
“Once you have done this then you plan the recovery so that the various curves of adaptation will coincide at the desired time.”
If you were to create a picture of this what would it look like? Sort of like a graph or chronology or even a painting I guess?
Mark Henschel, CSCS
Great post, Vern. Rest gets overlooked far too often. I personally dealt with the effects of overtraining in college resulting in a few nagging injuries and unnecessary fatigue.
I think that not only should the athletic development coach be aware of this problem, but it also has to be relayed to the sports coaches. We see a lot of soccer clubs/coaches that believe getting better at soccer is achieved by playing more soccer. With the intense focus they have on winning these days, it results in practices 3-4 times per week with 2-4 games on the weekends with very little slow down in the “off season”. Where is the rest going to fit in that schedule?
Some of the clubs/coaches notice the rise in injury, wonder why there is an increased injury rate and ask us to help with injury prevention. In these instances, they can help themselves – give the kids some time off!!
Matt Patterson, BSc
I agree Vern, recovery is key to any training program. I’m sure that we’ve all seen the ‘training-recovery’ graph before. I think it works and gives coaches a good visual reinforcement of the importance of recovery, but I wonder if anybody has collected any real data to fill in those numbers. ie – how many recovery days until an athlete is back to (or above) their previous performance?