Recovery

Successful athletes in many sports follow a process of overload and recovery.  Training produces microscopic tears to muscles, this is the overload part.  Recovery time allows those microscopic tears to heal. Muscles heal a little stronger and that’s when the increase in performance happens.  Training causes fatigue and stresses the system whereas recovery allows an athlete to improve and benefit from the investment in training.

What lesson can the rest of us learn from athletes?  Sprinting to be brilliant at work, racing to be a hero at home and pushing to be great at the times in between are as stressful as any training session.  Most of us recognize the physical and emotional fatigue that accompany a typical day.

However, we may be missing the overall cumulative effect of our day to day activities. A flogging for 11 months straight with a few weeks off at the end would not be anyone’s recipe for success in sport.  There is value in thinking about recovery on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.  This approach leads to sustained performance.

Athletes take the recovery process seriously.  They appreciate that improvement only comes from an opportunity to rest.  So much so that many athletes schedule the rest part of their training program before they plan the work.

Athlete or not, the key to high performance is in recovery not overload.  Success does not come from skipped meals, 80 hour work weeks and little sleep.

SDG