What is Sports Recovery?
Sports recovery is a term used by trainers and athletes that defines exercises, modalities, and therapies that are used to reduce soreness, increase range of motion, promote healing, and reduce the risk of injury. After training, your body is purposefully making you fatigued to lower your activity so that it can repair itself. When fatigued there are ways to optimize and enhance the recovery to speed up the repair and increase growth. You achieve this through sports recovery. Optimizing your recovery is the most efficient way to improve performance and stimulate greater muscle growth. Sports recovery is most important following a training cycle, but it can be implemented anytime throughout the exercises-adaptation cycle.
Although training is an important process of the exercise-adaptation cycle, it is not the most important part of the cycle. Training merely begins the exercise-adaptation cycle. Sports recovery is how you grow muscle and improve performance. Unfortunately, sports recovery has been overlooked and undervalued in a large portion of the athletic community. The focus has been on how to train more and about the new fancy way to train rather than how to optimize your training through recovery. Before we talk about optimizing sports recovery, we ought to talk about the exercises-adaptation cycle:
Here is the exercise-adaptation cycle:
What is Sports Recovery?
Sports recovery is a term used by trainers and athletes that defines exercises, modalities, and therapies that are used to reduce soreness, increase range of motion, promote healing, and reduce the risk of injury. After training, your body is purposefully making you fatigued to lower your activity so that it can repair itself. When fatigued there are ways to optimize and enhance the recovery to speed up the repair and increase growth. You achieve this through sports recovery. Optimizing your recovery is the most efficient way to improve performance and stimulate greater muscle growth. Sports recovery is most important following a training cycle, but it can be implemented anytime throughout the exercises-adaptation cycle.
Although training is an important process of the exercise-adaptation cycle, it is not the most important part of the cycle. Training merely begins the exercise-adaptation cycle. Sports recovery is how you grow muscle and improve performance. Unfortunately, sports recovery has been overlooked and undervalued in a large portion of the athletic community. The focus has been on how to train more and about the new fancy way to train rather than how to optimize your training through recovery. Before we talk about optimizing sports recovery, we ought to talk about the exercises-adaptation cycle:
Here is the exercise-adaptation cycle:
We train to stimulate the body towards adaptation. The fatigue from training is what stimulates the body to repair and adapt. Adaptation occurs during the recovery period. When the body is allowed to recover then it will enter supercompensation. Supercompensation is the over-adaptation the body employs to adapt to the training you are putting it through. Supercompensation is where you can get incredible gains.
Recovery is the only way to really get gains. Put your focus on your recovery and how training can facilitate that.
What happens if I don’t do Sports Recovery?
If you are skipping recovery, you will rarely enter supercompensation and you will be halted in your progress. In fact, there is overwhelming proof that if you do not do sports recovery then you will see an increase in overall fatigue, an increase in injuries, a decrease in performance, and you will experience cognitive/mood disturbances. By failing to recover you are training in vain.
If you are not doing enough sports recovery and you are failing to enter supercompensation then you are stuck in a period called overreach. Overreach is the state where your body is trying to adapt and repair. Overreach is a very normal state to be in following training. It usually lasts 4-7 days. You can optimize the effects of overreach by doing sports recovery and doing a deload week. Although overreach is normal and useful in helping you achieve supercompensation, you must take care of yourself during that period. If you do not support your body during overreach then you will have a high risk of injury, you will decrease your performance, and/or enter a state of overtraining syndrome (OTS). Once you have affected your body to the point of being in OTS then you are looking at weeks to be able to come back to homeostasis thus, severely reducing your performance and most likely lead you to an injury that will increase your time away from activity.
How do I optimize my Sports Recovery?
First you need to understand the difference between active and passive recovery.
Passive Recovery is your nutrition, the quality of your sleep, periodization, and your daily routine.
Active Recovery is injury prevention training, recovery modalities, and therapeutic modalities (like massage and adjustments).
Both types of recovery need to be optimized to receive the optimal results from recovery. The greatest obstacle to optimize your recovery is by finding time. If you plan when you will do active recovery, and how to implement passive recovery into your daily life then you will be far more successful. Athlecare provides the space, the sports recovery and knowledge to optimize your sports recovery.
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