Recovery

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.