You’re exercising frequently. Doing 5-12 workouts per week (yes, you’re doing workouts twice per day perhaps). Maybe preparing for a competition of some sort, maybe just personal competitions. In any case, with that many workouts, you have to think not just how to train hard, but also how to speed up your recovery.
In this article, we will cover:
- The theory of supercompensation
- How to measure your degree of recovery and fatigue. We’ll talk about both the psychological, and the physiological.
- Then, we will finally discuss several recovery strategies, and how to use them.
Original source: here.
The Theory of Supercompensation
You know this intuitively, but you exercise to get stronger, faster, have more endurance, etc. So you stress your body, make it get worse for a short period of time (anywhere from an hour to 2-3 days), before having a “rebound” effect, and getting better than the last exercise session. However, if you either don’t wait long enough to recover, or wait too long to recover before your next workout, you don’t get any better. You stagnate.
Here is a graphic representation of what it looks like. Check it out, because it will make the next paragraph easier to understand.
The key to continual progress is to constantly hit your next training session at the peak of the supercompensation curve. And that peak lasts 1-3 days.
This is the basics of exercise for continual improvement.
And the tighter you can make that curve, the more progress you will make, and the faster that progress will be. After all, a person who takes 5 days to reach the peak of the supercompensation curve can do about 6 workouts per month that are progressively better. Whereas a person who takes 4 days to reach the peak of the supercompensation curve can do about 7-8 workouts per month that are progressively better.
So it comes down to common sense. Who will make more progress: the person doing 6 high-quality workouts per month, or the person doing 7-8?
So if you can speed up your recovery time in between workouts, you’ll make more and faster progress.
The speed of your recovery depends on factors like:
- Your sleep quality
- Your nutritional status
- The difficulty of your workouts
- Life stresses
- Your implementation of recovery strategies
- Age
- Training experience
…and more.
Notice that of all those factors, the only one that you can’t control is your age. Everything else is within your control.
How “fresh” you are really dictates the need for recovery strategies. So we need certain measurements to figure out your degree of “freshness.” Going back to my article on the importance of measurements, we know that to be most effective, we have to measure our own unique response, and not go by general guidelines. After all, if you’re not assessing, you are guessing. So in the next section, we’ll discuss certain measurements you can take to assess your level of fatigue and recovery.
How to Measure Fatigue and Recovery
There are several ways to measure fatigue and recovery, and the list below is by no means comprehensive, but a great starting point.
Resting Heart Rate
You should know your resting heart rate (RHR). To get a true measurement, you should do it first thing in the morning, while still lying in bed. Count your heart rate for an entire minute. And it’s not a bad idea to keep a log of what your RHR is.
Assuming your RHR is stable (it’s within 1-5 beats each day), any deviations from that can be a sign of overtraining.
Generally speaking, if your RHR drops by 6 beats or more from one day to the next, you likely overdid your endurance workouts. By contrast, if your RHR rises by 6 beats or more from one day to the next, you likely overdid your strength/power workouts.
Orthostatic Heart Rate
Whereas your resting heart rate is a measurement of how you are at rest (obviously), the orthostatic heart rate (OHR) is a measurement of what happens when you gently stress the heart.
Here’s how you do this test: measure your heart rate after lying down for at least 2 minutes. Then, stand up, and note what your heart rate is 15 seconds after you’ve stood up. Then, measure it again at 90 seconds and 120 seconds after you’ve stood up.
Here’s what should happen: When you go from lying to standing, your heart rate should rise by 10-20 beats. Then, after the first 15 seconds, it should start dropping, reaching a low point between 90 and 120 seconds.
So for example, let’s say that your heart rate lying down is 50 beats per minute. Then, you stand up, and at 15 seconds, your heart rate is 65. By the end of 120 seconds, it might drop down to 55-60.
In a person who’s overtraining, the difference in heart rate between 15 seconds and 120 seconds will be smaller than in a person who is fresh.
So the key is to know your orthostatic heart rate when you’re fresh, and do this test on days when you want to gauge your recovery status.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
HRV is the difference between heart beats. If you have a pulse of 60 beats per minute, it doesn’t mean that your heart is beating at a robotic 1 beat per second. That’s certainly the average, but it doesn’t take into account the beat-to-beat variation. For example, the difference between one beat might be 0.8 seconds, and the difference between another beat is 1.2 seconds.
The greater the variation between beats, the healthier and fresher you are. Why? Because it means that your nervous system and your heart have strong communication, which allows them (your nervous system and heart) to make adjustments from one beat to the next. A low HRV indicates overtraining.
Unfortunately, there’s no low-tech way to measure HRV. This is a high-tech (but not necessarily expensive) test. Certain heart rate monitors come with an HRV calculation built in, and you can likely get them for under $150.
Physical Symptoms
Thus far, we’ve been talking about objective measurements of recovery. But there are also subjective symptoms of underrecovery. These include:
- Muscle soreness that doesn’t go away after a few days
- Dizziness
- Loss of periods (for women)
- Frequent illnesses (more than twice per year
Psychological Symptoms
There are other signs that indicate the freshness of your nervous system. These include:
- Appetite. A loss of appetite can be an indication of underrecovery
- Poor sleep. Poor sleep, despite good sleep habits can be an indication of underrecovery
- Irritability. If that’s unusual for you. If that’s your “status quo”, well… that sucks 😉
- Decreased motivation to exercise.
Any one of these signs by itself doesn’t mean very much. But if you have 3 or 4 of those, it’s a very strong signal of overtraining/underrecovery.
Performance in Consecutive Workouts
This is the most obvious one, and the most direct one. All of the previous measurements are really “proxy” markers for the most important thing in athletics: performance.
I have what I call “Igor’s 3 Workout Rule” (should I trademark that?). And that rule goes as follows: if for 3 consecutive workouts, your performance is either stagnant or declining, it’s time to change your program.
One bad workout can just be a fluke. Everyone has a bad day. Two bad workouts might just mean a bad few days. Three bad workouts in a row, and you can be extremely certain, that your program is no longer effective (even if it was effective when you started it, 1-6 months ago).
Recovery Strategies
So now that you know how to measure your degree of fatigue and recovery, let’s discuss the different recovery strategies that are available to you.
Again, the below list is far from comprehensive, but it covers the big basics (and a few that go beyond the basics).
Sleep
This one comes first, because it’s the most obvious, and people ignore the importance of it. Too bad, because this one will give you more bang for your buck than anything else. Yes, this will work better than any fancy high-tech stuff, like cold chambers, electronic muscle stimulation (EMS), and others. The others aren’t a necessity. But good sleep is.
You know that rule that says you should get 8 hours of sleep? That’s an average rule. But you’re not average. You’re exercising 5-12 times per week. So you need more sleep than the average person. For the really hard-training folks, they may need as much as 10 hours of sleep per day. Furthermore, your sleep needs fluctuate from day-to-day. It’s not like you can figure out your sleep needs with to-the-minute precision, and apply that every day. You can’t say “I’ve figured out that I need to be sleeping for 8 hours and 11 minutes each day.” The reason is that again, sleep needs fluctuate. On days when you exercised harder than your normal, you’ll need more sleep. On days that you’re not exercising as hard, you’ll need less sleep.
So how do you determine how much sleep you need on a day-to-day basis? You don’t. Your body does. Go to bed (ideally between 10PM and 11PM), and wake up without an alarm clock. This way, your body just takes what it needs.
I’ve written about sleep extensively before, so I won’t repeat it here, but if you want to learn more, read these articles:
How Bad Sleep Affects Your Hormones
Nutrition
This is another one of those basics that’s often neglected. But here are the bare basics of how to eat to speed up your recovery:
- First, make sure you’re drinking enough fluids. As a simple guide, go according to thirst. Forget that whole “drink 8 glasses of water per day” nonsense. I cover the reason why in my How Much Water Should You Drink a Day article.
- If you’re exercising hard enough, and long enough (at least an hour), make sure that your drink has a little bit of sodium, to help you hold on to the water. If your exercise isn’t hard enough or long enough, don’t worry about sports drinks or electrolytes. I elaborate on this in my article, Sports Drinks: Are They Any Good?
- Carbohydrates. Get enough of them. Ideally, your post-workout snack would contain 1.0-1.5 grams/kg of easily-absorbable carbohydrates, like rice, or something like dextrose/maltodextrin. So if you’re 70kg (154 pounds), you should get a snack that’s 70-105 grams of carbs. And then, about 1-3 hours afterwards, you should have a full meal that contains that same amount.
- Eating a generally anti-inflammatory diet. This is the common sense stuff: eat lots and lots of vegetables, a few fruits, some meat, fish or seafood, and no junk food or fast food.
Active Recovery
Now that we’ve gotten the “common sense” stuff out of the way, let’s get to the less common sense stuff. The first of those is active recovery.
Active recovery can mean a number of things. But what they all have as a group is that they don’t involve “just sitting on the couch, doing nothing.”
You would think that if exercise made you sore or burned out, then the absence of exercise would fix that. Logical, but not 100% true. Ironically, more exercise will actually speed up your recovery faster than the complete absence of exercise. But there is one important element here: it must either be very light, or it must either be very different.
For instance, if you did squats with 315 pounds, and now you’re sore, you would do squats with 45-135 pounds for high reps, of 15-30, staying really far away from muscular failure. At the end of the set of squats, you should feel like you could have done 10-20 additional reps, or more.
If you’re playing a lot of tennis, and your sports practice made you sore, consider doing a complete unrelated sport, at a light intensity, on a recreational level for one day, and that’s your recovery. Maybe go swimming, or cycling, etc.
If you’re a runner, and your hard workout meant running 20K, at a 5-minute-per-km pace, then either go for a walk of 3-4 km, or do a 4-5 km run at a 7 or 8-minute-per-km pace.
The reason that active recovery works better than passive recovery is by stimulating blood flow to the muscles. This raises body temperature, and helps clear away natural “waste products”, which come as a result of hard workouts.
Nutritional Supplements
Which supplements speed up your recovery depend greatly on which sport you are in.
If you are an endurance athlete, these may be helpful:
- B complex and CoQ10. They help with the part of the cell responsible for producing energy, like the mitochondria. My favourite B complex is AOR’s Advanced B Complex, and my favourite CoQ10 is Inno-Q-Nol by Inno-Vite. And no, I have no financial affiliation with these companies.
If you are a strength/power athlete, these may be helpful:
- Creatine. This is a natural source of energy in high-intensity activities. If you can replenish it faster, you can recovery faster.
- Beta-alanine. This is a molecule that helps buffer acid in the body. It is mostly used for activities lasting 60-240 seconds.
- Branched chain amino acids. These are the amino acids depleted the most by strength/power exercise. Supplementing with them may have a small effect on improved recovery.
- Protein. If you get enough protein through your food, additional protein may not really have a performance-enhancing effect. But sometimes, it’s tough to get enough from food, so some additional protein may be beneficial. It’s particularly helpful right before bed, when there will be no nutrients coming into your body for the next 8+ hours.
Heat/Cold Therapy
Although it’s being called into question now, one strategy that has been used over the last few decades is the use of both heat and cold therapy.
This could take a number of different forms. The advice is to use cold immediately after a workout. That can be a cold shower, a cold bath, or direct application of an ice pack to the target muscles.
Why use cold immediately after exercise? Because exercise causes inflammation. But that’s fine, that’s a desirable effect, after all. Inflammation is the process through which we get stronger, fitter, faster, etc. And cold helps reduce inflammation. After all, when you sprain your ankle, you ice it to reduce the swelling.
Beyond the first 6-24 hours after your workout, the advice is to start applying heat. Heat brings more blood flow to the area, and that blood flow brings nutrients to speed up muscle repair. As far as heat goes, it can take several forms, like:
- Hot packs, for direct application to specific muscles
- Hot showers or baths
- Saunas and steam rooms
The reason I say that this process has been called into question lately is due to books like Don’t Ice That Ankle Sprain, which argue that we don’t want to reduce inflammation after a workout, because it’s that inflammation that makes us stronger.
So right now, there are good arguments on both sides of the fence.
Massage and Self-Massage
Just as with a few other strategies, the goal here is to bring extra blood flow to working muscles in order to carry nutrients to speed up the recovery process.
On occasion, deep tissue is not a bad idea, to break up any scar tissue that is created by heavy training. However, deep tissue massage is not a good idea if you’re still sore, because it can slow down the recovery by creating additional inflammation.
I talk about this more in my article on foam rolling.
