Recovery and Adaptation

Why do we train? The short answer is adaptation. Whether it’s to get stronger, faster, fitter, or to perform better, we all seek adaptation. To achieve this, we need to apply a stimulus such as progressive overload. Where many of us fail is the follow up to the stimulus; recovery.

STIMULUS + RECOVERY = ADAPTATION

We are great at stimulus. Not only in the gym, but everywhere else in life. Perhaps the word should be stress rather than stimulus. We are great at getting charged up with caffeine, rushing to work, rushing to the gym on lunch break, getting home late and doing chores. All of this means we are in sympathetic mode, i.e. the fight or flight mode. Then we get up and do it all again. Maybe you develop some aches or pains, and the answer? Train harder, run more, do more, etc. But perhaps we have been thinking about this all wrong. We are forgetting the second variable in the equation; recovery. 

The law of diminishing returns applies here. At some point, if you chronically overtrain, and don’t allow for recovery, you will begin to plateau. Keep going, and you may develop some problems like chronic inflammation or injury. Joel Jameison, founder of morpheus, does a great job at explaining this in detail in this article. 

I have come to realize over the years of my own training, that recovery is a much larger part of the equation. Even if you exercise 6 days a week, that is only 6 or so hours in the week for the stimulus. All the other hours can be used for recovery. If we allow for it. This is the low hanging fruit, the easy stuff to achieve. However, so often it is neglected. 

We have to spend time in parasympathetic mode, the rest and recovery part of our nervous system. There are many ways to do this; meditation, gentle exercise like foam rolling, massage, reading, walking in nature, and incorporating a breathing practice. In fact, breathing can be used as an assessment tool to check in on your stress levels. The BOLT test is a simple way to see how stressed you are at any given moment, and is described in this article here. 

Sleep has been a hot topic, and for good reason. Of all the ways to recover, this one gets shoved to the wayside. I recently attended a conference with Kelly Starrett as the keynote speaker. He spoke about the need to protect and prioritize your sleep, and if you don’t “you’re playing with a loaded gun”. He also mentioned that 1 hour of disturbances a night is normal, so if you are shooting for 8 hours of sleep, you have to be in bed for 9. 

So how do we apply this? Get back to fundamentals and prioritize recovery. So that means better sleep, a movement practice, proper hydration and nutrition, and getting some sunlight. I personally use a morpheus watch that tracks HRV, a metric for how recovered you are. With that information, I determine the type of stimulus I will apply. If I have a high recovery score, I will have a heavier lifting day in the gym. A low score and maybe I’m working on mobility or doing some cardio training. The point is to highlight the recovery part of the equation. You’ll be surprised at how much you gain when you factor this into your training.