SERIOUS TRAINING 34
Recovery and Adaptation Aids
For the last four weeks I’ve taken you through the details of recovery. In this article I want to wrap up the discussion by answering one final question:
What are the best tools for improving recovery and, ultimately, performance?
Before we address that question, let’s briefly review an important concept: Recovery and adaptation are not the same thing. Recovery is your body’s response to fatigue. Adaptation is the physiological process of becoming fitter. Recovery makes adaptation possible, but they occur on different timelines. That means when feeling “recovered” (fresh), you are not necessarily “adapted” (more fit).
Recovery restores your body after training by replenishing glycogen, repairing muscle tissue, restoring fluids and electrolytes, calming the nervous system, and reducing fatigue. Adaptation is different. It’s the long-term improvement in fitness that results from repeated cycles of training and recovery. Examples of adaptation are more mitochondria, greater capillary density, increased stroke volume, better fat metabolism, and a higher lactate threshold.
The process looks like this:
Training Stress → Fatigue → Recovery → Adaptation → Improved Performance
If another hard workout is performed before adequate recovery, fatigue accumulates faster than adaptation can occur. If continued, performance eventually stagnates—or declines. You’re going backwards. On the other hand, if too much time passes between challenging workouts, recovery is complete, but the training stimulus becomes too infrequent to produce meaningful adaptation. You’re still going backwards.
That’s why training is always a balancing act. If you’re going to make a balance mistake, make it on the side of a little too much recovery.
The goal of a well-designed training plan isn’t maximum fatigue or maximum recovery. It’s finding the optimal balance between stress and recovery that produces the greatest adaptation.
Bear in mind that your ultimate goal after a challenging workout is to improve adaptation. Recovery is just a step along the way. Speeding up recovery may not be beneficial to adaptation. With this in mind, let’s look at the recovery aids that research—and decades of coaching experience—suggest are most effective for achieving both recovery and adaptation.
