073: How Long Do I Need to Recover?

We have talked extensively about ways to improve on this show.  We have episodes devoted to training paces and ideal workouts for different distances.  If you search the internet, you can find lots of resources and opinions on this topic. Check out social media and you can find a slew of athletes announcing their latest workout or training plan.  

That is not the point of this episode.  On this show we are going to discuss the often neglected aspect of athletic growth.  This episode is all about recovery.

As we have covered before, the workouts you put yourself through are important, but the body actually improves during times of rest and recovery.  To fully benefit from a hard effort, you need all of the materials to both recover and progress. This includes adequate sleep as well as plenty of healthy food including proteins, carbs, and fats.  

Plenty of people alternate easy and hard days and feel like they are in charge of proper recovery.  However, if that easy running day has no sleep and super high levels of stress and anxiety from life, it is not a recovery day, no matter how short the run or easy the pace.  

Fitting recovery within the time constraints of real life is a challenge we have discussed before.  How can you combine strength training, speed training, long runs, and still have sufficient recovery?   As a general rule of thumb, following speed days or long days with strength on the “recovery” day is a more dangerous approach, but is manageable.  It would be great if you could put strength on the speed day and then have a complete physically easy day. Angie covers her general weekly plan in the show on how she integrates strength training, running, and recovery.  

The final point on day to day recovery is to err on the side of more recovery.  The negative is that you will not progress as fast, but at least without frustrating injuries, you should progress steadily forward.  

Which brings us to the second portion of the episode... seasonal or cyclical recovery.  This section starts right where the first section ends. Consistency is the key to long term success.  

It is much more satisfying to keep moving forward rather than be sidelined on a regular basis due to injury or complete mental burnout.  When coming off of a forced break from mental or physical breakdown, athletes are prone to jumping back too fast. They go all out on early workouts bolster

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