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Recovery - Who needs it?
By Wayne Goldsmith | In Recovery
You do!
Lots of people are talking about recovery and for good reason.
Triathlon is a sport for people who love to challenge themselves to see just how far they can go to find out how hard they can push themselves physically and mentally.
But the nature of the sport and the people who love doing it means that triathletes live on the edge. The edge between training hard and training too hard, often with disastrous consequences. There is nothing worse than seeing a triathlete suffering from an illness or injury that could have been avoided.
Ideally, there would be a way of training hard and pushing your body to the limits complimented by a way of ensuring your body and mind could rest, regenerate and recuperate between sessions.
Enter Recovery: which is not one thing but a combination of techniques and methods designed to keep you training and racing at your best.
Who should include a recovery program in their training?
Take the Recovery Test
- Do you train twice or more each day?
- Do you train on five or more days each week?
- Do you often feel tired, fatigued and flat, even if you have had a day off training?
- Do you compete more than five times a season?
- Have you had recurring illness or injury?
- Do you run more than three times each week?
- Are you doing weight or resistance training?
- Are you aiming for a triathlon event that will challenge you to new levels?
- Do you have a full time job or other commitments which take up most of your time, e.g. study, maintaining a household?
- Do you often feel like something “is not quite right” with your training and competing?
If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, chances are you need to include recovery as a critical component in your triathlon training program.
So Why Recover?
We know that a good recovery program can help you achieve five key performance factors:
- You can increase the quality and quantity of training.
- You can reduce and minimize the risk of injury and illness
- You can manage increases and changes in training and minimize the risks of overtraining.
- You can manage your life better and reduce the feelings of fatigue from training that carry on into your work, family and personal life.
- You can feel better, after all you want to enjoy life while you live it.
Leading Australian Recovery Consultant Warren Lowry, a key member of the Australian triathlon team for many years says, “The critical issue for triathletes is to be able to reproduce quality sessions, that is, consistently perform sessions which are high quality in terms of technique, skill and intensity.
The nature of the sport means that residual fatigue can accumulate causing a compromised ability to train and race and potentially cause injury and illness. A sensible, effective, well implemented recovery program can provide triathletes with a real high performance edge by allowing them to training harder, more often and with a high level of skill and technique”.
Ok, so you need a good recovery program. What is a good recovery program?
A good recovery program includes:
- Sleep
- Hydrotherapies: i.e. water, ice, spa, sauna etc
- Appropriate Nutritional Strategies
- Massage, Physical Therapies
- Mental & Emotional Recovery Techniques
The Theory and Practice of Recovery
Sleep Theory: Sleep is the most natural, inexpensive and easy to manage recovery tool. This is the time when your body rejuvenates and many of the physical adaptive processes responsible for improving your performance take place. During sleep your immune, nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems all undergo physiological processes designed to help you recover.
Practice: Aim to get 7-10 hours of quality sleep each night. Try to make your sleep environment conducive to quality sleep. Use the DREAM guidelines:
Dark: make sure the sleep environment is dark – particular during the first two hours of sleep.
REM: Rapid Eye movement sleep – the cycle of sleep associated with dreaming and psychological well being. Critical for mental and emotional recovery.
Eight: Hours of sleep is commonly recommended but it is a very individual thing. Some people need 10 hours – some need less than 6. The quality of sleep is important.
Alcohol & Drugs: May seem to aid you actually falling to sleep but recent research suggests they may interfere with some of important physiological and psychological benefits derived from sleeping.
Monitor: When you wake, rate the quality of your sleep. A rating of five means a restful, rejuvenating sleep while a rating of one is a restless, “tossing and turning” type of night.
Hydrotherapy Theory: Water, ice and steam can all play a vital role in helping your body recover from hard training and racing. Its supportive, weight bearing characteristics and ability to flow on and around tried, aching muscles make it an ideal recovery tool.
Practice The Big Three: Ice , Hot & Cold, Spa
Ice, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr:
People have used ice for centuries to decrease pain and inflammation. In recent recovery research, it seems that exposure to cold water / ice slurry around 10 degrees Celsius is about the right temperature to get the optimal recovery response.
In practice this means throwing a bag or two of ice in a bath tub and using a cheap (waterproof) thermometer (one you can purchase from a swimming pool supplies store) to get the temperature right. Aim for about 3 minutes in the ice bath with your body submerged up to your neck. Jump out – have a warm shower for about 2 minutes. Stretch big muscles – chest, thighs, gluteals and repeat the ice / shower / stretch process 3 times.
Hot & Cold: Contrast Shower Technique
Jump in the shower. Make the water as hot as you can reasonably manage (carefully) for 30-45 seconds. Turn off the hot water and stand in the cold water for 30-45 seconds. Repeat 3-5 times. The hot water opens up, dilates or “flushes” waste products out of tired muscles and the cold does the opposite – causing a constriction of blood vessels to help remove waste products like lactic acid from the body.
Spa , ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh:
The great thing about spas is that you can use the jets and streams like “water massagers”. Try to keep moving slowly in the spa doing some light stretching of large muscles and some self massage on problem areas.
A good routine is:
- Spa – 4-5 minutes
- 1-2 minutes in a cool shower
- Stretch for 2 minutes
- Drink 150 mls of water / sports drink – you have got to keep hydrated!!!
- Repeat the process 3 – 5 times.
Nutrition for Recovery: Eating Your Way to Regeneration:
Theory: Many regenerative and restorative processes rely on having the appropriate raw materials to help the body recover. Immune system function, body fluid and electrolyte balance, replenishment of energy stores and the repair and building and rebuilding of muscles all depend on a high performance post exercise nutrition program.
Post exercise recovery rules:
- Eat some carbohydrate rich foods – approximately 1-1.2 gms of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight – as soon as possible after training or racing.
- Combine carbohydrate intake with 10-20 gms of protein to help in repair and rebuilding processes and protein synthesis.
- Drink – water / sports drink – sufficient to replace fluids lost during training and racing.
Practice - Five great post exercise recovery rich snacks for triathletes:
- 2 Crumpets with Peanut Butter
- Breakfast cereal (about 2 cups) with ½ cup of milk
- 200-300 gms of baked beans with a slice or two of wholemeal toast
- Sports Bar (read the labels – look for carbohydrate, sodium and protein)
- 500 mls of low fat flavoured milk
Massage Theory
Massage aims to help tissues of the body, including muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints recover and rejuvenate from strains and stresses. Massage can be applied just to isolated parts of the body (eg legs or back) or to the whole body, to heal injury, relieve psychological stress, manage pain, and improve circulation.
Practice: Massage feels great and is a fantastic physical and mental recovery tool. Make sure you find a massage practitioner that:
- You like – someone you can communicate with.
- Has experience working with athletes and ideally endurance athletes.
- One who really understands the “good hurt” concept.
A good recovery massage is one which facilitates and encourages natural healing and regenerative processes. It is normal and usual to feel a little soreness after a massage but if the soreness persists for more than a day or so after the massage it is possible the healing has become “hindering” and may have even made things worse.
Mental recovery, tired brain, Tired Athlete
Theory: There is no doubt that a triathlete can become tired mentally as well as physically. It is important to include a mental recovery program in your overall recovery strategy.
Practice: Try the F.E.E.L. system of measuring and managing mental fatigue and to help your plan a psychological recovery program.
F – Feeling. There is a strong link between how you “feel” and how you train or race. If you feel flat, low, tied, sore, irritable and fatigued, you tend to train and race poorly. Keep in tune with your feelings – they can be a great indicator of how your body is responding to hard training.
E – Emotions. Emotions can also be an indicator of how your body is adapting to training. Negative emotions, negative thoughts and negative feelings only lead to one thing………….more of them.
E – Energy. Tired, fatigued people will often feel low on energy. Monitor these energy feelings and use them to provide you with feedback on how your body and mind are dealing with training and racing loads.
L – Learn to monitor then manage your emotional fatigue.
Many world class athletes find it useful to measure and monitor their physical and mental fatigue by using a well being chart.
It takes only moments to complete and it provides a very clear visual picture on your state of fatigue and recovery.
| 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | |
| Fatigue / Tiredness | Very fresh | Fresh | Normal | More tired than normal | Constantly tired |
| Sleep | Very restful | Good | Trouble falling asleep | Restless sleep | Cant sleep at all |
| Soreness | Feel great | Feeling good | Normal | Feel al little tight and sore | Really sore |
| Stress | Very relaxed | Relaxed | Normal | Feeling stressed | Very stressed / hard to function |
| Feelings | Very positive mood/ feel great | A generally good mood / feel okay | Seems to have lost interest in training | Snapping at training partners, family and co-workers | Highly annoyed / irritable/ down |
Triathlete Well Being Chart – Circle the response that feels most relevant to you.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Tired, flat, negative, lethargic, stressed. | Feel fantastic, fresh, positive, energized, wonderful. |
Triathlete Well Being Chart - Circle the number which best represents how you feel today.
Wayne Goldsmith
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