SERIOUS TRAINING 32
Mesocycle: Fatigue & Recovery
It is critical to performance that you place as much emphasis on recovery as you do on working out. Both are necessary for high performance. One without the other will eventually lead to failure. The challenge is finding the right balance.
With that in mind, I’ve emphasized in my last four articles that the key to high performance isn’t just hard workouts. It also includes low-intensity training and frequent recovery.
It’s possible to do too much. You can do too many hard or long workouts, which will eventually lead to some form of breakdown—injury, illness, loss of motivation, or other problems. It’s also possible to recover too much, which leads to a loss of fitness. Balancing training stress and training recovery is critical.
As I explained last week, the stress of hard or long workouts causes fatigue. If that fatigue is not excessive, your body responds to the measured breakdown by adapting. This is your opportunity to elevate fitness.
In the hours after a stressful workout, your body shifts from “work mode” to “repair mode.” It restores expended energy, rebuilds microscopic muscle and soft tissue damage, reduces inflammation, and makes other fixes. These repairs make your body slightly more resistant to a similar exercise stress the next time you workout. You become more fit.
The time required for these changes to fully occur depends largely on how stressful the workout was. If the training load—intensity, duration, or both—was significantly greater than your current fitness level, the time required for adaptation will be much longer than after a low-intensity or shorter workout.
The bottom line: recovery is just as important for improving fitness as the stress created by a hard workout.
As a serious athlete, recovery isn’t important only after a demanding session. There are many other times when it plays a pivotal role in race preparation.
For example, most athletes benefit psychologically from taking a day off every week. You’ll feel refreshed and eager to begin training again. Fitness will not be lost. Training will improve.
There are also other times when recovery plays a major role in event preparation.
Pre-race recovery is critical when peaking for an A-priority event. This is perhaps the most important recovery period of your season. I’ll return to this topic in a future article because getting the balance between stress and recovery right in the final weeks before a major race can be challenging.
If we define a “season” as a period of several weeks culminating in an A-priority event, recovery again plays a pivotal role. Most athletes will have at least one such season each year, and two is common. Following a season, you also need time to recover from the cumulative stress of weeks of focused training. We call this recovery time the “off-season.” Recovery now is essential before beginning the next season.
But the time when recovery arguably plays its single most important role is during a mesocycle.
A mesocycle is a period of several weeks, usually a month or less, when training is focused on a specific purpose. This is a critical time in your training. Getting the timing and amount of recovery right within a mesocycle helps you manage stress and ultimately build more fitness.
There are typically two ways to recover from accumulated fatigue at the end of a mesocycle: scheduled recovery and recovery on demand.
I want to show you the advantages and disadvantages of each method and how to select the one that best manages the balance between stress and rest for you.
