So I was going to title this blog “There is no such thing as overtraining, just under-recovery” but that phrase is way over-used out there in blog-ville. For good reason though; it’s totally true. I get asked a lot about overtraining because I train quite a bit relative to other recreational gym goers. I have several blog posts on my workouts but in general I’m at the gym 6 days a week for an average of 90 minutes a day; some days 1 hour and some days 2. I like to break my workouts into 2 visits because I can get better intensity out of two one hour workouts as opposed to one two hour workout. Sometimes that’s all lifting, sometimes its all high intensity interval training and sometimes its a mix. No matter what, I always get 2-3 core workouts (20 min) in a week and 1-2 short sprint sessions on the treadmill. I’ve been doing this for 3 years with no injuries and yeah I have tons of energy. Most of my major muscle groups can fully recover from a hard workout in less than 24 hours and the ones that can’t (I’ve been working on those lately) are finally getting close. It hasn’t always been like this for me though…

Lets roll the clock back though to before my trainer educated me on the right way to workout and recover. For close to 20 years I lifted 3-5 times a week (always heavy) for about an hour each and didn’t do any interval training much less any core or cardio and now I’ve got a back full of titanium and a shoulder full of plastic as a result. I was constantly hurting something and let me tell you an L4-L5 fusion is no walk in the park and having your bicep tendon, labrum, and rotator cuff all repaired at once ain’t no picnic.

OK, so how did I turn it all around? Well, I got help from someone who knew what she was doing, my personal trainer. Not only did I learn proper technique but I got super interested in the science behind all of it – so much so that I got my CSCS and am now into a Master’s program for Health Science/Sports Performance. So now I’d like to share a little of what I do for recovery. If you are like I was, busting your ass at the gym and as a result breaking things in your body left and right, this post is for you. Trust me, you can bust ass even harder provided you know how to properly recover. People tell their trainers all the time “Yeah, back the day I used to workout like an animal, bla bla bla…”. Well for me, my “back in the day” is right now, I exercise harder and with more intensity than ever before and I feel fantastic.

We usually think of fatigue as being the main culprit behind our inability to perform at the level we’d like to “Yeah, I’m just wiped out, I need more rest” but
that’s not always the case (although its usually a big part of it). Below is a great diagram from my Applied Exercise Physiology text mapping out the main factors affecting performance. Your recovery strategy needs to encompass all of these elements, not just fatigue.

Now lets drill down on fatigue with this picture from the same text. I won’t discuss all of these items in these diagrams for the sake of time, but you can see just how much more there is to your ability to perform other than not getting enough rest and just how much more complicated fatigue is.

Here are the main elements of my recovery protocol, I’m sure with some research you can find other great tips but I can tell you this has been working for me for 3 years and is a big part of my success at the gym. In no particular order:

• Sleep: Should be no surprise, doubt anyone would argue this. I get 6-8 hours per night pretty regularly. Search any bodybuilding website and you’ll find great articles but there are so many you might wonder what’s really going on while you sleep. Check out google scholar and you’ll find lots of great papers like this one: Sleep and muscle recovery: endocrinological and molecular basis for a new and promising hypothesis.
• Nutrition: Check out my blog post how I eat and this one on basic nutrition. Do some googling on the timing of your meals as well, what you eat before and right after a workout is also critical to recovery especially if you’re going after two a day workouts. There’s a small window right after your workout (30 min or so) where you can replenish muscle glycogen more efficiently than later; that’s why if you’re doing two a day workouts you need to eat right away. I always eat pre and post workout.
• Foam Rolling: I foam roll every day and I can’t say I noticed a big difference when I started but if I stop I can start to tell that things are going downhill. Research papers like this one show varied results; it’s certainly not “the thing that everyone is missing” but research can be a funny thing. This is easy to try yourself so why not?
• Periodization: What I do really isn’t periodization, its more like planned cycled programming. My trainer switches my whole workout up every 6 weeks or so with a totally different focus. Usually there’s a week in between of recovery type stuff. Lower intensity, body weight, unilateral (one arm), light running. I doubt you’ll find anyone who knows anything about strength and conditioning that wouldn’t agree this is key for both injury prevention, boredom prevention, and decreased recovery times.
• Massage: I found some good papers on how massage doesn’t help decrease time to optimal performance for your next workout but it sure does seem to help for me. Well, its relaxing if nothing else but I get a massage once a month. Here’s just one example where there’e little scientific evidence but an acknowledgment that the “feel good” benefits may yield other positive results in the gym.
• Hot Tub: I do a 10 minute hot tub after almost every workout and it didn’t seem to help much at first.  Now, if I miss a few in a row because of time constraints I can tell a difference. Here’s a pretty good paper on water therapy in general; at the end of the day who cares though, if its easy and works for you then do it!
• Stretching: Here’s another huge topic – tons of blogs, articles, chapters in text books and research papers. Here’s a typical paper that I think covers a lot of bases. Here’s what I do though based on reading all this stuff.  No static stretching before, it can do more harm than good. I do hardly anything before, sometimes a little dynamic stretching but mostly I just warm up with lighter weights. Post workout I’ll do some static stretching of chest, shoulders, lower back and hips. I do this after almost every workout for 5-10 min. Every once in a while I’ll come in just for a stretch and roll session.
• Active Recovery: Even doing all these other things there are weeks where I’m just destroyed and don’t feel like its a good idea to push it so instead of whatever is planned that day I’ll do  a recovery workout. This involves light weights, higher reps, unilateral work, core work, light running. This paper is about climbing and active recovery but I think it can generalized. I should probably do more of this after every workout but sneaking it in as a replacement workout is working well for me now…
• Cardio: I get mine through high intensity interval training, I do 2×45 minute small group sessions a week and one 60-90 minute session with my partner. Yeah, that’s a lot but I think this one is right up there with diet and sleep. The physical and mental benefits of high intensity interval work are amazing. Worthy of a blog post maybe next time.
• Consistency: This is a big one not often thought about I think in terms of recovery. If you are inconsistent in your training, your ability to efficiently recover will also be inconsistent. No I don’t have research to back this up, this is based on my experience. In other words, when someone tells me “It’s not good that you go out there and lift for an hour after a 45 minute HIT class, that’s not enough recovery time” I explain to them that I’ve been training like this for a long time now and my ability to recover quickly matches my ability to train hard. So, yeah, I recover much faster than someone who doesn’t work as hard as I do but only because I pay as much attention to recovery as I do training.

Have a Great Workout!