training | recovery

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Carrying out great training is not just a matter of conducting tough, high-quality workouts. If reaching one's potential depended solely on training very hard, all resolute athletes would be in top form. But all resolute athletes are not in top shape; in fact, just a small percentage of them actually reach their pinnacle of fitness. The reason for that is not that athletes are lazy; most work very hard. The real problem is that high-quality work is a double-edged sword: it can lead you to your highest-possible level of performance, or it can destroy your ability to perform as well as you can. Doing too much hard training can devastate your muscles, harass your hormonal system, and implode your immune system. Strenuous training must be balanced optimally with rest and recovery in order to reach the mountain-top.

Unfortunately, identifying the right balance of hard work and recovery is the most difficult part of serious training. It's much more intractable than the creative process of determining which workouts will actually be undertaken. If your training programme has too much recovery, you won't be able to carry out enough quality work to reach your peak. If your schedule has too little recovery, muscular trauma will accumulate steadily over time (because muscles won't be able to repair themselves properly after workouts), until performances actually worsen instead of getting better. As noted training theorist Tudor Bompa said in his popular book Theory and Methodology of Training, Recovery should be so well understood and actively enhanced that it becomes a determinant component in training. In other words, recovery must do more than simply rest the muscles; it must actually move fitness upward.

For that to be true, you must completely understand recovery. You must know exactly what recovery is and precisely how long it takes. Just as you actively work to upgrade your speed of movement in competitions, you must also learn techniques for increasing your speed of recovery, so that the amount of quality work you do can be progressively expanded.

What exactly is recovery?
Understanding recovery is the easy part. It's simply the repair of the damage which naturally occurs to structural proteins in muscles and connective tissues during a workout. If you're a runner, those structural proteins are traumatized by the impact forces associated with running; some proteins are literally torn apart by the eccentric forces which occur as muscles are stretched under tension during the gait cycle. If you're a cyclist, swimmer, skier, race-walker, etc., the impact forces are lower or non-existent, but your muscles still are strained by the forces required to carry out your workouts. Recovery is also the restoration of the energy-producing enzymes inside muscle fibres which are naturally broken down during training. In addition, it's the refilling of the carbohydrate fuel stores within muscle cells, fuel depots which are at least partially emptied during workouts. And it's the return to normal of the endocrine, nervous, and immune systems, all of which are perturbed by a bout of physical training.

However, it's important to remember that if training is proceeding correctly, muscles should do more than just restore their status quo during recovery periods. Rather than merely repair existing proteins, they should add additional proteins to their overall structure in order to increase strength. They should also synthesize greater-than-normal quantities of aerobic enzymes in order to expand lactate threshold and VO2max. And they should store unusual quantities of energy so that the durations of quality workouts can be extended and high-quality speeds can be maintained for longer periods of time during races. If these extra processes do not occur, then one would never
improve in response to training. Race performance times would be constant (or deteriorate if recovery processes could not even preserve the status quo).


A one-armed study
But how long does it take for the body to fully recover and perhaps adapt after a strenuous workout? Recently, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis made a stab at determining how long recovery really takes.

Their subjects, six healthy young men who regularly engaged in weight training, carried out four sets each of biceps, concentration, and preacher curls (12 sets in all), with three to four minutes of rest between sets. Resistance was set at 80 percent of maximum (ie, 80 per cent of the heaviest weight which could be lifted successfully once only), and each set consisted of as many reps as a subject could handle (The Time Course for Elevated Muscle Protein Synthesis following Heavy Resistance Exercise, Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 20(4), pp. 480-486, 1995).
A unique aspect of the research was that each athlete carried out the curls with only one arm, while the other arm rested. The scientists used an isotope tracer to determine protein uptake in the exercised arm, comparing it with routine protein synthesis in the arm which had not done any lifting.

Based on this study and a previous investigation, the scientists determined that the rate of protein synthesis in muscles stressed by a hard workout increases by about 50 per cent four hours after the rugged workout is over, while the rate of synthesis in muscles not used during training remains unchanged. This is evidence that muscles are repairing damage accrued from the workout and perhaps building new structures to make themselves stronger and more fatigue-resistant in the future (if this were not the case, protein synthesis in the exercised and unexercised arms would be the same).

How long does it take?
This repair and perhaps renew process seems to peak about 24 hours after a workout, when muscle protein synthetic rate was up by a hefty 109 per cent in the McMaster-Washington research. However, the McMaster-Washington scientists found that about 36 hours after a rough workout, the building process is pretty much over, and the muscles are back to routine housekeeping. It's important to point out that this study was carried out with experienced weight trainers; novice lifters might have required a longer recovery process. It's also important to note that the research was conducted with strength rather than endurance athletes, so the recovery process might proceed within a different time frame following an endurance-type workout. Note, too, that a more difficult workout might have required longer recovery.

Finally, there is undoubtedly variation between athletes. For example, although the average recovery time was 36 hours in the McMaster study, some individuals might be finished recovering just 30 hours after a similar workout, while others could take 40 to 48 hours. As you can see, lots of factors can interact to determine recovery time.


The 36-hour scheme
However, if recovery time truly averaged 36 hours or so after high-quality endurance workouts, there would be some intriguing implications. As a case in point, you might carry out a high-quality workout early on Monday morning. 36 hours later you would be recovered, so you could do some intervals at a high intensity on Tuesday evening. 36 hours after that, you would be ready again, so you might complete some hill climbing (or swimming against resistance if you're a swimmer) or some fast reps on Thursday morning. By avoiding working out at the same time every day and by using the 36-hour recovery principle, you would have completed three good sessions in the Monday-through-Thursday time slot, instead of your normal two, and yet achieved excellent recovery. You could then take it very easy (or do nothing) on Friday and compete in a race or carry out a long workout on Saturday. After an easy Sunday, you would be ready to resume your 36-hour, training-recovery scheme.

However, there's an even more appealing aspect to the McMaster research. An elite athlete might carry out a variety of different workouts and using the radioisotope technique perfected by the McMaster scientists check leg-muscle recovery after
each type of training session. The same athlete could then carry out his/her high-quality sessions at almost the exact moment at which recovery from prior training was complete.

By doing this, little training time would be wasted (unnecessary recovery would not be undertaken) and more quality work could be wedged into any particular cycle of training.


But here's the rub
Of course, the only nettlesome point in all of this would be the unpredictable effects of accumulated fatigue. For example, an athlete might normally take 36 hours to fully recover from a particular interval workout. However, if two days prior to the interval session the athlete had undertaken an unusually tough training session, he/she might not be fully recovered at the outset of the interval workout. As a result, recovery from the intervals would take longer than expected (because the muscles would have to repair problems not only from the intervals but from the previous hard exertion as well), and the athlete who confidently embarked on yet another quality session 36 hours after the intervals, believing that his/her muscles were in good shape, could in fact be training in a quality way much too soon, increasing the risk of injury and burn-out.
Since determining optimal recovery time can be tough, it's very important to take specific steps to speed up recovery time. By doing so, you'll decrease the risk that you are piling up too many quality training sessions within one portion of your training cycle, and you'll enhance your chances of really adapting to your training.


Speeding up recovery
But how can you hasten recovery? As we've mentioned many times before in PP, one of the best ways to accelerate recovery is to take in an adequate amount of carbohydrate shortly after a workout is over. You're a wise athlete if you consume 300 to 400 calories of carbohydrate shortly after a workout is over and another 300 to 400 calories of carbs within the following two hours.

Our rationale for recommending this carb-replacement strategy is that it appears to be an excellent way to increase the likelihood that muscular fuel stores will be replenished in time for subsequent workouts. After all, muscle cells are most receptive to the idea of taking on carbohydrate during the two-hour window after a workout is over; after that, the carbo-storage process slows down, even when rich lodes of carbohydrate enter the body.

But there is an additional reason to reach for the carbs shortly after a training session is over. As it turns out, the post-workout carbohydrate also has a positive impact on protein restoration in muscles, because it both inhibits protein breakdown and stimulates protein synthesis.

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