Recovery Training – Finding the right balance between hard work and recovery

recovery2 - Recovery Training - Finding the right balance between hard work and recoveryThis is the third article in this excellent series containing absolutely vital information about programming training for maximum gains. Every athlete owes it to themselves to thoroughly grasp and apply these concepts. Mike.

Too much hard training can devastate your muscles and implode your immune system.

Creating a great training programme is not just a matter of writing tough, high-quality workouts. Almost anyone can do that.

In fact, if reaching maximal athletic potential were simply a matter of finding the right workouts, then you would have no difficulty becoming maximally fit. You could carry out a strenuous effort on Monday to boost VO2max, a rough affair on Tuesday to breed better economy, a scintillating tempo session on Wednesday to heighten lactate threshold, a sizzling set of intervals on Thursday to further raise VO2max, and so on. Within a few weeks, you would be performing as well as you possibly could.

Unfortunately, that won’t happen, because high-quality work is a double-edged sword. It can lead you to your highest-possible level of fitness, or it can destroy your ability to produce top performances. Doing too much hard training can devastate your muscles, harass your hormonal system, and implode your immune system.

That means that to create your best-possible training programme, you have to figure out a way to do as much quality training as possible during a given time period – without doing too much work.

You’re looking for the right balance of hard work and recovery, and that’s the really difficult problem in putting together the right training programme. Basically, you must figure out a way to complete a difficult training session, one which will produce the needed improvements in your fitness, and then recover for just the right amount of time before undertaking another quality session.

If you don’t recover for long enough, your muscles won’t be ready for the subsequent session, and muscle damage will occur. If you recover for too long, you’re wasting your time. Instead of carrying out another fitness-boosting workout, you’re taking it easy, thinking that you need recovery.

You have to recover for just the right amount of time. As noted training theorist Tudor Bompa says in his popular book Theory and Methodology of Training: ‘Recovery should be so well understood and actively enhanced that it becomes a determinant component in training’.

How not to do it

But how can you determine exactly how much recovery you need? Most athletes simply use a trial-and-error method. Many of them train hard until they become overly fatigued and then have to take time off to recover. It’s an inefficient system, and one that carries a high risk of overtraining. Other athletes are more cautious, training hard once every three or four days or so because they’re afraid to overdo it. This is also inefficient; these individuals could perform much better if they could fit more quality work into their schedules.

What does science have to say about finding the right balance? Researchers know that the key aspect of the recovery process occurs in the muscles. After an intense workout, muscles are slightly damaged. Damaged structures need to be repaired to prevent more serious damage in subsequent workouts – and to ensure that the next workout can be carried out effectively. Also, muscle fatigue must disappear; otherwise the subsequent session will be carried out in the tired state, increasing the risk of injury.

In addition to the repair and fatigue-removal processes, things need to be created in the muscles. More proteins must be laid down so that the muscles can contract more forcefully, and more energy-producing enzymes must be synthesised so that the muscles can work harder without becoming fatigued.

In other words, recovery is a process involving the creation of new muscle proteins. If scientists could track how long this process goes on after intense sessions, they could help us reckon optimal recovery lengths. After all, you don’t want to work out when protein creation is just getting started – or when protein is being produced at a high, steady level. Working out then would disrupt the recovery process. You want to wait until the protein creation has just about ended – and then immediately train again to start the process anew.

The latest evidence

Recently, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis made a head start on reckoning recovery times. Their subjects, six healthy young men who regularly engaged in weight training, carried out four sets each of biceps, ‘concentration,’ and ‘preacher’ curls (12 sets in all), with three to four minutes of rest between sets. Resistance (weight) was set at 80 per cent of maximum (80 per cent of the heaviest weight which could be lifted successfully one time), and each set consisted of as many reps as a subject could handle.

The unique aspect of the research was that each subject carried out the curls with only one arm; the other arm rested. The scientists could then use an isotope tracer to determine protein uptake in the exercised arm and compare it with routine protein synthesis in the arm which had not exercised.

Combining this research with a similar, past effort, the scientists determined that muscle protein synthetic rate increases by about 50 per cent four hours after a workout. This is evidence that muscles are repairing damage accrued from the workout – and also building new ‘stuff’ to make themselves stronger and more fatigue-resistant.

This ‘repair and renew’ process seems to peak about 24 hours after a workout, when muscle protein synthetic rate was up by a hefty 109 per cent in the McMaster-Washington research. However, about 36 hours after a workout, the whole process is pretty much over, and muscles are back to routine housekeeping.

It’s important to point out that this study was done with experienced weight trainees; novice lifters might have required a longer recovery process. It’s also important to note that the research was conducted with strength rather than endurance athletes. The recovery process might proceed with a different time frame following a more endurance-type workout. Also, there is variation between athletes. Some individuals might be all done recovering after just 30 hours or so, while others could take 40 to 48 hours.

Still, the McMaster work is intriguing – and has some interesting implications. If 36 hours is about the right recovery time for most athletes, then training could be adjusted accordingly – and in a pattern which most endurance athletes do not employ.

Using a 36-hour recovery clock

For example, you might carry out a lactate-threshold workout early Monday morning. 36 hours later you would be recovered, so you could do fast, hard intervals at 90 to 95 per cent of maximal heart rate on Tuesday evening. 36 hours after that, you would be ready again, so you might complete some hill work or fast reps on Thursday morning. By avoiding working out at the same time every day and by using the 36-hour principle, you would have completed three good sessions in the Monday-through-Thursday time slot, instead of your normal two, and yet achieved excellent recovery (naturally, you would ensure that your fluid, protein, and carbohydrate intake would be high between workouts, especially during the two-hour ‘window’ following each session). Not wishing to push your luck, you could take it easy (or do nothing) on Friday, and then have a race or long run on Saturday. After an easy Sunday, you would be ready to resume your 36-hour plan.

Wanting more precision, serious athletes could have their muscle protein synthesis rates assessed in the laboratory after different workouts and determine their required recoveries after intervals, long runs, reps, tempo efforts, etc. They would then be better able to coordinate their quality efforts with their recoveries and lay out scientifically sound training programmes.

Not just the muscles

Of course, one problem is that recovery is not centred only in the muscular system. You have to recuperate psychologically from stressful sessions (if your concentration is below-par during subsequent efforts, your coordination and overall form will deteriorate), and the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems all have to get well, too. However, the muscular and immune systems are interrelated (the muscles produce chemicals which stimulate white blood cells), so good muscle recovery should enhance immune functioning. If overwork is being prevented at the muscular level, we can only hope that the nervous and endocrine systems will be okay, too.

The bottom line? You probably can do more quality work than you’re doing now, but you have to make sure that the quality increase doesn’t lead to overtraining. Since scientists suggest that 36 hours may be enough time for recovery, one solution to the need for more quality work is to ‘stagger’ good workouts so that they occur on Monday morning, Tuesday evening, and Thursday morning (or some other similar pattern). That would still leave you with 48 hours to recover if you wanted to race on Saturday morning.

Unfortunately, we still don’t know much about recovery over the long term, so it’s not clear whether you could do this every week. One possibility would be to work out in a quality way just twice during the first week of the month, use the 36-hour principle during the second and third weeks, and then return to less-frequent intense training for the fourth week.

We also don’t know what effect a very easy workout has on the recovery process (using the schedule above, with 36-hour recoveries and tough work on Monday morning, Tuesday evening, and Thursday morning, would you be better off resting completely on Wednesday – or engaging in some light exercise?). You’ll have to study yourself to see how you respond. Although much more recovery research needs to be done, it’s safe to say that judicious use of the principle of 36-hour recoveries should help you gradually increase your frequency of quality work – and make you a better athlete.

Questions you’ve always wanted to ask about the recovery process

Athletes are often confused about recovery. To ease that confusion, we’ve posed the most commonly asked questions about recovery below, along with the appropriate answers. First, though, we need to define a couple of recovery terms.

Compensation is what happens to your body after a workout is over. It involves a return to normal for heart rate and blood pressure, removal of excess lactate in the blood, storage of glycogen in muscles, repair of muscle fibres, restoration of normal hormone levels, and so on. Compensation brings your body back to its normal state of functioning after a training session.

Overcompensation is the process that actually makes you a better athlete. During over-compensation, your muscles stockpile higher-than normal amounts of glycogen, synthesise greater-than-usual quantities of aerobic enzymes, add new proteins to muscles to make them stronger, etc. In other words, your training stimulates you to ‘rebound’ to a higher physiological state.

Q: Should you try to conduct another quality workout during the overcompensation phase which follows a strenuous session, as experts recommend?
A: Ideally, the time to carry out the next quality workout would be at the exact end of the overcompensation stage, which appears to be about 36 hours after a previous tough session. If you try to train before overcompensation has ended, you won’t be able to perform as well as you can, since restoration and repair won’t be completed (your workout will be lower quality).

However, it is true that top athletes sometimes try to ‘jam’ workouts together so that a second exertion occurs well within the overcompensation phase (an extreme example of this is the Kenyan cross country runners’ tendency to conduct two quality sessions within about four hours of each other when they are attempting to peak for the world championships). This jamming would interrupt the compensation process before it really got going – but might lead to ‘superovercompensation’ – a greater-than-normal response during the next 36 hours.

Q: Do men recover from tough exertions more quickly than women, as the experts suggest?

A: That would seem to make sense, since the male sex hormone, testosterone, is a noted booster of protein synthesis, but the available research doesn’t support the idea. If anything, studies suggest that females may recover more quickly from roughly equivalent workouts (say, doing numerous sets of a tough weightlifting routine). It is clear that age and experience play a strong role in recovery; the younger you are and the more experienced you are at a particular activity, the quicker your recovery.

Q: Is the recovery process psychological as well as physical?

A: Yes. Anything which enhances your ability to relax between workouts will help you, because it will improve your concentration and motivation during subsequent exertions. Relaxation also helps reduce stress-hormone levels, which should promote greater glycogen storage in the muscles.

Q: What if I start feeling too tired to train properly when I use 36-hour recoveries?

A: Go back to your usual recovery period, and try using 36-hour recoveries when you are better rested and fitter.

Q: What can I do to optimise the recovery process?

A: When you’re training strenuously, make sure you take in about 16 calories of carbohydrate per pound of body weight each day. Also get enough protein – about three-quarters of a gram per pound of body weight daily. Bias your intake so that much of it occurs during the two hours after a workout. Stay relaxed and get plenty of sleep. And finally, follow the 36-hour rule between some of your quality sessions. All of these steps should allow you to get in more quality work – and yet still recover effectively. The bottom line is that you’ll become a better athlete.

Owen Anderson

This article was taken from the Peak Performance newsletter, the number one source of sports science, training and research. Click here to access these articles as soon as they are released to maximise your performance

Recovery Training – Speeding recovery for progressive gains

recovery - Recovery Training - Speeding recovery for progressive gainsThis article continues to expand on the preceding ones published in this blog, and which should form the basis upon which all good training programmes are designed. You can only train as well as you are recovered. Lessons hard learned… Mike.

Carrying out great training is not just a matter of conducting tough, high-quality workouts. If reaching one’s potential depended solely on training very hard, all resolute athletes would be in top form. But all resolute athletes are not in top shape; in fact, just a small percentage of them actually reach their pinnacle of fitness. The reason for that is not that athletes are lazy; most work very hard. The real problem is that high-quality work is a double-edged sword: it can lead you to your highest-possible level of performance, or it can destroy your ability to perform as well as you can. Doing too much hard training can devastate your muscles, harass your hormonal system, and implode your immune system. Strenuous training must be balanced optimally with rest and recovery in order to reach the mountain-top.

Unfortunately, identifying the right balance of hard work and recovery is the most difficult part of serious training. It’s much more intractable than the creative process of determining which workouts will actually be undertaken. If your training programme has too much recovery, you won’t be able to carry out enough quality work to reach your peak. If your schedule has too little recovery, muscular trauma will accumulate steadily over time (because muscles won’t be able to repair themselves properly after workouts), until performances actually worsen instead of getting better. As noted training theorist Tudor Bompa said in his popular book Theory and Methodology of Training, Recovery should be so well understood and actively enhanced that it becomes a determinant component in training. In other words, recovery must do more than simply rest the muscles; it must actually move fitness upward.

For that to be true, you must completely understand recovery. You must know exactly what recovery is and precisely how long it takes. Just as you actively work to upgrade your speed of movement in competitions, you must also learn techniques for increasing your speed of recovery, so that the amount of quality work you do can be progressively expanded.

What exactly is recovery?

Understanding recovery is the easy part. It’s simply the repair of the damage which naturally occurs to structural proteins in muscles and connective tissues during a workout. If you’re a runner, those structural proteins are traumatized by the impact forces associated with running; some proteins are literally torn apart by the eccentric forces which occur as muscles are stretched under tension during the gait cycle. If you’re a cyclist, swimmer, skier, race-walker, etc., the impact forces are lower or non-existent, but your muscles still are strained by the forces required to carry out your workouts. Recovery is also the restoration of the energy-producing enzymes inside muscle fibres which are naturally broken down during training. In addition, it’s the refilling of the carbohydrate fuel stores within muscle cells, fuel depots which are at least partially emptied during workouts. And it’s the return to normal of the endocrine, nervous, and immune systems, all of which are perturbed by a bout of physical training.

However, it’s important to remember that if training is proceeding correctly, muscles should do more than just restore their status quo during recovery periods. Rather than merely repair existing proteins, they should add additional proteins to their overall structure in order to increase strength. They should also synthesize greater-than-normal quantities of aerobic enzymes in order to expand lactate threshold and VO2max. And they should store unusual quantities of energy so that the durations of quality workouts can be extended and high-quality speeds can be maintained for longer periods of time during races. If these extra processes do not occur, then one would never improve in response to training. Race performance times would be constant (or deteriorate if recovery processes could not even preserve the status quo).

A one-armed study

But how long does it take for the body to fully recover and perhaps adapt after a strenuous workout? Recently, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis made a stab at determining how long recovery really takes.

Their subjects, six healthy young men who regularly engaged in weight training, carried out four sets each of biceps, concentration, and preacher curls (12 sets in all), with three to four minutes of rest between sets. Resistance was set at 80 percent of maximum (ie, 80 per cent of the heaviest weight which could be lifted successfully once only), and each set consisted of as many reps as a subject could handle (The Time Course for Elevated Muscle Protein Synthesis following Heavy Resistance Exercise, Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 20(4), pp. 480-486, 1995).

A unique aspect of the research was that each athlete carried out the curls with only one arm, while the other arm rested. The scientists used an isotope tracer to determine protein uptake in the exercised arm, comparing it with routine protein synthesis in the arm which had not done any lifting.

Based on this study and a previous investigation, the scientists determined that the rate of protein synthesis in muscles stressed by a hard workout increases by about 50 per cent four hours after the rugged workout is over, while the rate of synthesis in muscles not used during training remains unchanged. This is evidence that muscles are repairing damage accrued from the workout and perhaps building new structures to make themselves stronger and more fatigue-resistant in the future (if this were not the case, protein synthesis in the exercised and unexercised arms would be the same).

How long does it take?

This repair and perhaps renew process seems to peak about 24 hours after a workout, when muscle protein synthetic rate was up by a hefty 109 per cent in the McMaster-Washington research. However, the McMaster-Washington scientists found that about 36 hours after a rough workout, the building process is pretty much over, and the muscles are back to routine housekeeping. It’s important to point out that this study was carried out with experienced weight trainers; novice lifters might have required a longer recovery process. It’s also important to note that the research was conducted with strength rather than endurance athletes, so the recovery process might proceed within a different time frame following an endurance-type workout. Note, too, that a more difficult workout might have required longer recovery.

Finally, there is undoubtedly variation between athletes. For example, although the average recovery time was 36 hours in the McMaster study, some individuals might be finished recovering just 30 hours after a similar workout, while others could take 40 to 48 hours. As you can see, lots of factors can interact to determine recovery time.

The 36-hour scheme

However, if recovery time truly averaged 36 hours or so after high-quality endurance workouts, there would be some intriguing implications. As a case in point, you might carry out a high-quality workout early on Monday morning. 36 hours later you would be recovered, so you could do some intervals at a high intensity on Tuesday evening. 36 hours after that, you would be ready again, so you might complete some hill climbing (or swimming against resistance if you’re a swimmer) or some fast reps on Thursday morning. By avoiding working out at the same time every day and by using the 36-hour recovery principle, you would have completed three good sessions in the Monday-through-Thursday time slot, instead of your normal two, and yet achieved excellent recovery. You could then take it very easy (or do nothing) on Friday and compete in a race or carry out a long workout on Saturday. After an easy Sunday, you would be ready to resume your 36-hour, training-recovery scheme.

However, there’s an even more appealing aspect to the McMaster research. An elite athlete might carry out a variety of different workouts and using the radioisotope technique perfected by the McMaster scientists check leg-muscle recovery after each type of training session. The same athlete could then carry out his/her high-quality sessions at almost the exact moment at which recovery from prior training was complete.

By doing this, little training time would be wasted (unnecessary recovery would not be undertaken) and more quality work could be wedged into any particular cycle of training.

But here’s the rub

Of course, the only nettlesome point in all of this would be the unpredictable effects of accumulated fatigue. For example, an athlete might normally take 36 hours to fully recover from a particular interval workout. However, if two days prior to the interval session the athlete had undertaken an unusually tough training session, he/she might not be fully recovered at the outset of the interval workout. As a result, recovery from the intervals would take longer than expected (because the muscles would have to repair problems not only from the intervals but from the previous hard exertion as well), and the athlete who confidently embarked on yet another quality session 36 hours after the intervals, believing that his/her muscles were in good shape, could in fact be training in a quality way much too soon, increasing the risk of injury and burn-out.

Since determining optimal recovery time can be tough, it’s very important to take specific steps to speed up recovery time. By doing so, you’ll decrease the risk that you are piling up too many quality training sessions within one portion of your training cycle, and you’ll enhance your chances of really adapting to your training.

Speeding up recovery

But how can you hasten recovery? As we’ve mentioned many times before in PP, one of the best ways to accelerate recovery is to take in an adequate amount of carbohydrate shortly after a workout is over. You’re a wise athlete if you consume 300 to 400 calories of carbohydrate shortly after a workout is over and another 300 to 400 calories of carbs within the following two hours.

Our rationale for recommending this carb-replacement strategy is that it appears to be an excellent way to increase the likelihood that muscular fuel stores will be replenished in time for subsequent workouts. After all, muscle cells are most receptive to the idea of taking on carbohydrate during the two-hour window after a workout is over; after that, the carbo-storage process slows down, even when rich lodes of carbohydrate enter the body.

But there is an additional reason to reach for the carbs shortly after a training session is over. As it turns out, the post-workout carbohydrate also has a positive impact on protein restoration in muscles, because it both inhibits protein breakdown and stimulates protein synthesis.

And now, a one-legged study

We know this thanks to some excellent work carried out by the same research team which completed the radioisotope-recovery studies mentioned above. In their new investigation, eight men who had been carrying out regular resistance training for at least one year challenged the quadriceps muscles in just one of their legs by performing an exhausting series of knee extensions (eight sets of 10 reps at 85 percent of their one-repetition max). Immediately after these cruel exertions and again one hour later, they ingested either a Nutrasweet-dulcified placebo or a carbohydrate supplement containing one gram of glucose per kilogram of body weight. Since the men weighed about 75 kilograms each, this meant that they were taking in 300 calories of glucose right after the workout and also one hour later. Using their familiar radioisotope technique, the researchers looked at protein synthesis in both the exercised and unexercised legs (Effect of Glucose Supplement Timing on Protein Metabolism after Resistance Training, Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 82(6), pp. 1882-1888, 1997).

As it turned out, protein synthesis was 36-per cent greater in the exercised leg, compared to the non-exercised leg, when the men took in glucose after the workout. In other words, the glucose was spiking protein synthesis in the exercise-traumatized leg but doing little for the leg which had not engaged in training. Meanwhile, the protein-synthesis rates in the exercised and unexercised legs of the placebo (no-carbohydrate) subjects were exactly the same! Since protein synthesis was not increased in the exercised leg when no glucose was taken on board, the processes associated with recovery were simply not initiated.

In addition, protein breakdown in the exercised legs was significantly lower when glucose was taken after the workout, compared to when placebo was swallowed. Thus, the ingestion of carbohydrate after the training sessions led to a much more positive protein balance in the athletes’ bodies (protein balance is simply net protein synthesis minus protein destruction) and therefore was associated with a much more effective recovery.

You might be shocked to hear that protein breakdown would occur inside muscles after workouts. After all, why would muscle fibres want to tear themselves down following a bout of physical exertion? As it happens, this teardown is actually part of the remodelling process that muscle cells undergo after stress; damaged structures and enzymes are destroyed to make way for the new proteins which are about to be created. In addition, if fuel is not quickly supplied to the muscle, some proteins may be broken down and used for energy to keep the muscle cells viable until the empty energy depots are re-filled.

Carbs helping proteins

Why did carbs have such a positive impact on protein creation and why did they thwart protein destruction? They may have helped protein synthesis in a couple of key ways. First, the inflow of carbs may have simply given the muscle cells the necessary fuel to embark on the project of rebuilding. Using this carbohydrate energy, the muscles could grab amino acids from the bloodstream and kick-start the process of creating new proteins.

The carbs also boosted the production and release of insulin from the athletes’ pancreases; plasma insulin values were three to eight times higher after the workout in the glucose group, compared to the placebo exercisers. Insulin is a noted anabolic (tissue-building) hormone which has a profound positive impact on protein synthesis in muscles. Insulin also tends to suppress protein breakdown.

The lessons from this research are important and obvious. By taking in ample amounts of carbohydrate immediately after training and again an hour later, athletes can get a head start on re-fueling their muscles after workouts, but they will also shape muscle-protein dynamics to favour protein creation and disfavour protein catabolism.

That is THE essential aspect of the recovery process. Athletes who fail to take carbohydrate following their workouts because of sheer negligence or a desire to shed weight are losing out in the long run, because their recovery processes are sub-optimal.

What about endurance athletes?

You might have noticed that both of the studies described above involved strength training. Would the same kind of results be obtained with endurance athletes? That is, do endurance-type workouts produce the protein-breakdown and protein-synthesis rates which are associated with strength sessions?
Research in this area is somewhat sparse, but a couple of years ago investigators at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston studied seven female collegiate swimmers who carried out an interval workout consisting of 4600 total metres of swimming and on separate days a whole-body resistance-training session and also a super-session which combined the interval and strength workouts into one big bout of training (Muscle Protein Metabolism in Female Swimmers after a Combination of Resistance and Endurance Exercise, Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 81(5), pp. 2034-2038, 1996).

The resistance workout was a tough one, consisting of three sets of six reps of bench presses at 80 per cent of the one-repetition max (1 RM), three sets of 10 reps at 65 per cent of 1 RM for military presses, side laterals, latissimus pulldowns, biceps curls, triceps pushdowns, leg presses, leg extensions, leg curls, hip abductions, and hip adductions, and two sets of 30 abdominal crunches. Rest between sets lasted for only 60 to 90 seconds.

Meanwhile, the endurance-training workout, which was typical of the kind of session conducted routinely by the collegiate swimmers, included a warm-up consisting of 500 metres of freestyle swimming, 200 metres of kicking, 200 metres of pulling, and 200 metres of technique drills. The main portion of the session was composed of 10 200-metre intervals at an intensity of 85 to 90 per cent of max heart rate, four 100-metre kick intervals, two sets of four 25-metre pull intervals, plus a 200-metre cool-down. Recovery swims between intervals accounted for the other 700 metres of swimming. As mentioned, the strength-plus-endurance workout simply combined the weight workout described above with this interval session.

What were the recoveries like?

As expected, protein synthesis was greatest after the combined resistance-interval workout, but interestingly enough protein creation tended to be about 35-per workout.

Thus, there’s clear evidence that endurance-type work initiates a recovery process which may be even more dramatic than the restoration which occurs after a pile of tough resistance work. In addition, the rate of protein breakdown was about equal after the resistance and endurance-type interval training.

Given that swimming has none of the impact forces associated with running, those findings are very important for runners. One would expect that an intense running workout would produce even more protein breakdown than a swimming session and therefore necessitate even greater protein-synthesis rates following training. Thus, it appears that runners need to be especially scrupulous with their post-workout nutrition.

Overall, the lesson is that combining an endurance workout with a strength session seems to create a need for even more dramatic protein building, compared to performing a single session. Therefore, you need to be extremely vigilant with your recoveries on days when you complete both a strength and a quality endurance workout. That particular combination requires extra carbs after each session (or extra-extra carbohydrate if the two types of training are combined in one long workout), extra sleep during the night after the workouts, and a light day of work the next day.

Here are the key things to remember about recovery:

  1. If you feel tired or sluggish on a particular day, don’t train or train very, very easily: Your body is telling you that what you need is recovery, not hard work.
  2. If a quality workout was scheduled for the day, postpone it and carry it out the following day if you feel better, as long as you don’t have another quality session scheduled for the day after that. Two quality sessions in a row are usually too much,especially if you have been experiencing above-normal fatigue.
  3. To increase the number of quality workouts you carry out (ie, to avoid spending too much time recovering), try to use the 36-hour principle. For example, you could perform a quality workout Tuesday morning, another Wednesday evening, and a third intense session Friday morning, thus fitting three tough sessions into a time frame which usually accommodates just two. You could then take Saturday off and complete a long workout on Sunday.
  4. To jump-start recovery and be kind to your muscle proteins, make sure you replenish yourself with ample amounts of carbohydrate shortly after your training sessions.

Ultimately, you are the best judge of how well you are recovering between workouts.

If you look forward to each week of training and approach your quality workouts with high energy and determination, you are recovering well perhaps too well, but it is better to recover too well than to recover poorly (recovering too well means you could probably carry out your difficult workouts sooner than you usually do). If you are feeling tired during many of your weekly workouts and your performance times are a bit off, it’s quite likely that you can improve your performances not by working harder but by increasing the quality and quantity of your recovery.

Owen Anderson

This article was taken from the Peak Performance newsletter, the number one source of sports science, training and research. Click here to access these articles as soon as they are released to maximise your performance

Endurance Training – Avoiding the no man’s land

endurance training - Endurance Training - Avoiding the no man's landLatest research indicates that over 90% of our endurance training should be done at a pace so slow that we feel almost “guilty”, with only around 3% going really hard and very little in the so called “tempo”  (no man’s land) zone… Mike

How a train low, train high approach can lead to increased performance

endurance training1 - Endurance Training - Avoiding the no man's land

In recent years, the ‘middle way’ has been a popular mantra of politicians. However, as Joe Beer explains, when it comes to training intensity in endurance sports such as cycling and triathlon, the middle way is most definitely not the most effective route to elite performance

Professional elite athletes know how to train because they have access to the best coaches and a because of the Darwinian process that ‘kills off’ bad methods and keeps good ones thriving! However, until very recently, the amateurs have never had access to the facilities and coaching backup of elite performers, so more often than not they have tended to source information from the best athletes they know locally and/or the group ethos prevailing in their particular training group or environment. The problem with this approach is that the ‘sheep mentality’ of merely doing what everyone else does is not especially effective. And let’s be honest, sheep don’t win many athletic medals!

Peaks in the clouds

Athletes used to look to the top of the sports mountain, shrouded in the clouds of greatness, and wonder what went on up there. Take, for example, the secret regimes of the 1980s ‘doctors’  behind the Iron Curtain, possessed of the ability to increase team performances in track, field and cycling. Nowadays, we have greatly increased transparency with more and more data from individuals, teams and countries, and from journals and interviews. From 4km cycling powerhouses (1) to elite junior rowers (2), as well as many others, data is published for all to see. Thankfully, we can now see that the gains are less about pharmacology and more about the analysis of training, outcomes and lessons learned.

For example, the prologue ride of cyclist Bradley Wiggins in this year’s Tour De France was online within days so that cycling fans could swoon over the his super-human effort – an average power output of 442 watts. Wiggins also published blood test data to counter any suspicion that he must have been on ‘something special’ to get fourth place overall. However, that’s a separate article entirely about champion genetics, weight loss and superb equipment choices.

Fortunately, this new openness gives sports scientists, coaches and amateur athletes the chance to see how the best actually train, and most importantly for you, it allows a trickle down of certain ‘golden nuggets’ of information from upon high. Think of it in the same way that steering wheel control paddles trickled down from rallying and F1 racing to your family car.

So it was fascinating when recent data were presented in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance on 36 elite junior rowers’ actual training data(2). These data will rock the training methods of some and give the thumbs up to what others are already doing. What they suggest in a nutshell is that the ‘Goldilocks’ approach to training (not too hard, not too easy) is detrimental for optimum performance, resulting in a no man’s land of not much progress.

endurance training2 - Endurance Training - Avoiding the no man's land

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Researchers in Germany have looked at the training and competition data of elite rowers with national, world and Olympic rowing performance capabilities. Over a 37-week period, training was quantified methodically using heart rate monitoring, assessment of lactate threshold points (the point at which fatiguing lactate begins to accumulate rapidly in the blood) and performance outcomes. The rowers (14 of whom went onto Olympic finals), were lab tested to find critical points of blood lactate concentration in order to define certain training zones. These have been discussed previously in PP (see issue 239) and are shown below:

While you probably won’t have a blood lactate tester to hand, it’s quite easy to get a feel for the 2 and 4mmol/L levels. Below 2mmol/L of lactate, there’s no burning sensation and heart rates are around 60-75% of maximum. Between 2 and 4mmol/L, blood lactate builds and declines, never quite bringing you to your knees but you definitely get a sense of a ‘workout’. Above 4mmol/L, (sometimes referred to as the ‘lactate or anaerobic threshold’), exercise feels very hard, and in fact rowing data suggests that 6-8mmol/L is often reached in training by elite rowers. This high-intensity effort is such that once under way, you hope it ends very quickly! Typically, it involves from around 40 seconds to 8 minutes of maximal effort (2).

When the researchers analysed the 37-week data, their findings were very interesting. One of the most important of these was that internationally successful junior rowers performed 95% of all specific rowing training at a heart rate corresponding to a blood lactate concentration under 2mmol/L (see figure 1).

endurance training3 - Endurance Training - Avoiding the no man's land

Within the average 12-14 hours of training per week the athletes logged over the scrutinised period, this meant six hours of actual rowing in Zone 1 (Z1). Two to three hours were spent resistance training, two hours doing alternative steady state aerobic training, and one hour doing warm-up/flexibility work. Given that this data covered the competition period, it is very, very important to note that the athletes did just 30 minutes a week of very high intensity work.

The real world

Many endurance athletes do events that, in the real world, typically last from 15 to 20 minutes and upward. These include 5K road races, 10-mile time trials and sprint triathlons. Few actually compete in events as short as the rowers tested, though anyone in an event lasting over 40 seconds is really an endurance athlete. Many people are now entering ultra-endurance triathlons such as the Ironman where finish times are 9 to 17 hours. Similarly, sportive cycle events lasting 4 to 10 hours are attracting record numbers. How should these athletes train?

From earlier work on rowers (3), the importance of training below the anaerobic threshold has been steadily gaining attention; and anaerobic thresholds are increasingly being used as a diagnostic tool rather than a training method. In short, the anaerobic threshold is not the Mecca of training effort; it’s merely one of the many ways used to measure an improvement or decline in fitness capability. Trying to train at threshold is not the way to train: you are working too hard to be easy and too easy to be properly hard!

As respected cycling journalist and coach Fred Matheny put it almost 15 years ago in an article in Bicycling: ‘NML (no man’s land) workouts provide a kinaesthetic sense of working hard but expose the rider to too much stress per unit gain. Instead most base training should be guilt-producingly easy, and the top end, high-intensity-training (HIT) should be very mentally hard, not sort of hard’ (4).

Rowing quality sessions

Lets look at what the rowers in this study did for quality (3). Over the study period, they averaged just 2-3% of their time performing very high intensity efforts. In distance terms they did 73km in the tempo zone (Z2) but just over 3200km in Z1. Although 2000m rowing requires just 6-7 minutes of maximal effort, they still focused on ‘very easy’ or ‘very hard’.

Examples of these high-intensity sessions included:

  • 2-3 x 3-10 mins @ 90% HRmax – 10-20 mins recovery between;
  • 2-8 x 40-120 sec @ maximal effort – 5-15 mins recovery between.

In order to be ready for this very high level of effort, you need to ensure you’ve done your base sessions in a controlled manner. The priority is being ready to do the hard work, not making endurance sessions harder than they need to be. Far too many athletes try to push the base and then fail to go really hard for their HIT training.

Why does train low, train high work?

How is it that large amounts of low-intensity work can develop base conditioning, aid recovery from HIT sessions yet not turn an athlete into a ‘plodder’, churning out ‘junk miles’? Well, first off if you do your base work in the 60-80% HRmax zone, you will get as fit and efficient as your genetics will allow for that particular training mode.

However, you can’t turn base work into quality – it can be good quality technical work and it can be good quality tempo of movement, but it can’t be harder than the Z1 upper threshold. If you train in Z1 consistently, allow recovery and have no major health issues, your body will reach around 90% of its potential – no tempo work, no HIT and relatively little effort. Although you may feel guilty, easy training can get you 9/10ths of the way to your peak potential!
You can train excessively in the tempo ‘no man’s land’ zone for years. But while it gives you a buzz from your workouts and gets reasonable performances, the inputs verses the outputs never match up. For example, if you train over 15 hours per week but include more than 25% of your training in Z2 ‘no man’s land’, you’ll fail to get better despite logging more time than others who do mostly Z1 and are improving. Remember the phrase ‘guilt-producingly easy’ for more than 90% of your week, especially if you’ve been someone who has always trained too hard up until now. Figure 2 shows how elite athletes across a range of sports spend most of their time in zone 1.

endurance training4 - Endurance Training - Avoiding the no man's land

For many athletes, the ‘train low, train high’ mantra requires a mindset change, forcing them to think about things differently. Perceptions such as ‘base is easy now’, ‘I can relax knowing I don’t have to keep up with other people’ or ‘It’s now more enjoyable but also more effective’, are typical when people finally get what the elites already know.

Summary

Whatever endurance athlete type you are, train low, train high can work for you. This does not mean ‘go easy, we don’t want to push ourselves do we?’ Inclusion of the very high intensity (Z3) work is absolutely critical. However, for long-term success, you need to construct your training so that the body can evolve in a very patient way. Many athletes, even with the best coaching, only see on average a 2 to 8% improvement in a given year, especially those who’ve got several racing seasons under their belts already. If you’ve been struggling in no man’s land and not making much progress, try using train low, train high approach and set realistic improvements of say 5% (not 10 or 15%) faster for 2010. And if you remember the valuable three golden nuggets above, better times are ahead.

Joe Beer is an endurance coach working with cyclists, triathletes, duathletes and runners through his company JBST.com. He is also the author of ‘Need to Know Triathlon’ (Harper Collins)

References

1. Med. Sci Sports Exerc. (2002) 34, 6, 1029-1036
2. IJSPP (2009), http://tinyurl.com/kwe26d (in press)
3. Int. J Sports Med. (1993) 14, S3-S10
4. Bicycling Oct (1995) p.90
5. J Strength Cond Res. (2007) 21, 3, 943-949
6. Scand J Med Sci Sports (2004) 16, 49-56
7. Scand J Med Sci Sports (2004) 14, 303-310
8. Med. Sci Sports Exerc. (2005) 37, 3, 496-504
9. Scand J Med Sci Sports (2003) 13, 185-193

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