What is recovery from strenuous sports training all about? People who exercise regularly and play sports often spend a lot of time preparing careful training programs for sports performance. These focus on positively developing all areas of fitness and technique important to the successful completion of your favorite activity. Some enthusiastic runners, cyclists, and triathletes plan their year’s activities around participating in races (marathon, triathlon, etc.) or hoping to perform at their best in each race. In the rush to go faster and stronger, an important aspect of training is often neglected: sports recovery. However, in the experience of successful athletes (particularly those in endurance sports), more time spent in sports recovery leads to an improvement in the quality of sports training, as well as optimal results in competition.
What is Sports Recovery?
Exercise at all intensity levels acts to do one thing to the body: it exhausts it. The depletion involves your energy stores (muscle glycogen, blood glucose, and fat products in your blood), hormones, and muscle structures. In other words, you use up the body’s valuable resources while exercising and something needs to be done to replace them.
To retrain and continue to condition your body to meet your exercise goals, it is
It is important to create time and take active steps to rebuild depleted bodily resources. This is what sports recovery is all about: conscious action to help the body return to its optimal state of exercise. This is especially important if you intend to exercise intensely or for long periods shortly after a grueling match. This could be a resistance training program, a multi-stage bike race, or sports competitions just 2-4 weeks apart
Why bother with Sports Recovery?
In the simplest terms, you need to be concerned with sports recovery in order to continue exercising physically at the level you want. Even more importantly, to allow the body’s systems to recharge enough so that your mental edge remains honed to the fine sharpness you desire. A dull edge arises from insufficient recovery and can come back to haunt you in these ways: stagnation, loss of interest, reduced physical ability, decreased tolerance for sports training. Yes, indeed, the first steps towards overtraining.
A good approach to sports recovery will ensure that the quality of your sports training and competition is high. This will help you feel satisfied with your efforts and achievements and build continued confidence in your chosen endurance sport. A good recovery also allows you to exercise a greater overall sense of control of your sports performance training destiny!
When should I think about Sports Recovery?
You need to consider sports recovery on both a macro and micro level. An example of a macro level would be a period of time in preparation for sports performance training (for example, a week or a month) or the period between competitions on your racing calendar. A micro level consideration would be after a single very hard or exhaustive workout.
At the macro level, resource depletion will have emerged as a systematic and progressive attrition parallel to your rigorously planned training schedule. It’s not about the one mind-boggling training session here, but the cumulative effect of all the sessions combined, and possibly even the race. While a single sports performance training session can leave you feeling fatigued, depleting your body’s resources over a period of time (which can be as short as a week or months) will leave you feeling that your to exert yourself physically is less. a bit dull. The legs feel heavy and tired, and cannot withstand prolonged exertion as they used to.
The micro recovery level responds to the body’s painful need after that supremely challenging sport.
performance training session, back-to-back training sessions in some boot camp, or the huge real
effort put into a competitive event (for example, running a marathon) . The latter involves not only the event itself, but also mental stress, increased adrenaline, and even mundane activities like traveling to the competition venue.
What are the steps I need to take to recover properly?
Be sure to consider your macro and micro needs. Maintain an awareness of these by using a
Sports performance training/race calendar that allows you to visually assess the training and competition phases you are going through. Similar to the periodization approach to training, this will help you plan your recovery periods and make them an integral part of your sports performance training plan. Now consider the elements of recovery: nutrition, regeneration of the structure, reduction of inflammation, hormonal and mental. Make plans for each of these.
Nutrition involves replenishing the resources you have expended in your prodigious attempts to go faster and stronger. This includes a particular emphasis on replacing the following nutritional components: carbohydrates to rebuild muscle glycogen for muscle recovery, and minerals and electrolytes to compensate for loss through sweat. The best time to rebuild glycogen stores is within the first 3 hours after sports training, as this is when the rate of glycogen storage is highest. Such storage remains elevated for the next 21 hours, but not at the same rate as during what has been called the “critical reactivation window.” There is scientific evidence to suggest that the first hour after your exercise session is actually the time when your body responds best to glycogen replenishment.
However, for some athletes, there are barriers that need to be overcome to meet this
Need for exercise nutrition. This includes not feeling hungry or not having the correct nutrition available.
Positive steps must be taken to overcome them. Have nutrition available. If you don’t have the stomach to eat, drink your nutrition (energy drinks, carbohydrate mixes). Find nutritional sources that agree with you and use them.
If you’re fairly lean (meaning your body fat content is low), you also want to make sure your energy
replacement includes a balanced diet containing FAT and protein. Your overall energy needs are higher than someone who hasn’t yet discovered long-distance running or triathlon training (poor people). So meet your higher energy needs and balance your energy sources: about 50-60% from carbohydrates, 15% from protein, and up to 30% from fat.
Reducing exercise is a good idea for 4-5 days after a strenuous run. This does not mean
just lying around doing nothing, although that may be the order of the first day after competing. You’ll want to spend time actively stretching those tired, tight muscles, and by day four or five, a light ride on the bike or a few easy laps will help keep your mind happy while you rest your muscles, tendons, joints, and joints. the bones. of your body. This is what is called “relative rest” with “active recovery” components.
The sports recovery period is a useful time to catch up on equipment maintenance issues. And in the long run, these really matter. Wipe seawater off your running shoes, wash your bike and take it to the shop for fitting, wash worn out heart rate monitor straps, etc.
Finally, there is the massage. Do I detect any jubilation out there? The goal of massaging tired, sore muscles is to relieve tension that has built up in the muscles, as well as help flush out chemicals.
substances that accumulate during exercise and as a result of cellular activity. So, just as top cycling teams bring their own masseuses to races (especially touring bikes), you can help your body along with a judiciously administered massage. And if the discomfort or pain persists, there may be an injury that needs attention from your sports doctor. The recovery period is a good time to get this under control, to deliver it in optimal shape when you return to training again.
In short, sports recovery is not something that all athletes think about, and some do it better
What others. It’s something you should invest as much effort into as you do into your sports performance training preparations. It is an integral part of restoring your body to a condition that allows you to enjoy regular and ongoing training and competition.