The Recovery Week

It's late Feb and many of you are probably in the early parts of your training cycle. Others with early season races might be later in their training cycles. In either case, it's important to schedule recovery as part of your training. For the athletes I coach and for myself, I typically schedule a recovery week after every three-four weeks of training. This gives the body a chance to recover and solidify in some of the fitness gains you've made over the last few weeks of training.


How to Design a Recovery Week
For the self-coached athlete, knowing how to design a recovery week is key. And even for those of you that have coaches that schedule your own workouts, it's important to note that recovery takes precedence over any scheduled workout. Don't lose the big picture (recovery in case you missed it) in going out of your way (missing sleep, skipping meals, etc) just to get in that 4 mi run your coach scheduled for you. So here are some things to include when designing your recovery week:

• Make sure you quality sleep (8+ hours if you can)
• Maintain workout frequency but cut intensity and especially volume. Cutting activity all together could result in detraining!
• Take a mental break by pursuing some other activities or sports you like. Just watch the intensity--don't go play 2 hrs of pickup soccer for the first time in 4 months.
• Eat proper meals. Less time to work out means more time to eat right. No excuses.
• Skip workouts if your heart or mind just isn't in it. You'll feel better the next day for it.
• Find time to nap! Take a lesson from your kids or pets. (P.S. This is my personal favorite method of recovery)
  

How will you know it worked?
The best timed recovery weeks come just before you feel achy and sore and feel like you're losing fitness and motivation. By the middle to end of your recovery week, hopefully those aches and pains have subsided and you're itching to get back out there and train. Good! This keeps the motivation to train high and highly motivated athletes do better. It might even be quantifiably better. It's not unusual to go out there post recovery week, and find that you can run/bike/swim the same courses in less time with less effort (as measured by heart rate or perceived exertion). You might be scoring new critical power records on the bike. Fitness gains are typically not linear... they come in sudden spurts after days or weeks of plateauing.

Some Advanced Topics
How long is a recovery week? For the truly fit, you might find that you only need 5 days instead of 7. Play this in your favor by training hard through the previous weekend and then taking 5 "easy" days. Then schedule some "B" races during the upcoming weekend. You might be surprised how well you do.