Train to Recover
Tibetan Unicorn Milk
Last week, I talked about Heart Rate Variability and how it’s a great instrument for monitoring your recovery. This week, I want to get a little deeper into why I think recovery should be a priority in your training. That is if your goal is improving your fitness rather than displaying it. There’s a difference! I’ll also share some tips on what you can do to improve your recovery efforts, thereby improving your fitness.
Hint: no ice baths, saunas or Tibetan Unicorn Milk is required.
Stress gets a bad rap. Don’t get me wrong, piling on too much stress is a horrible idea. But the fact of the matter is, is that without stress we don’t grow. And in some cases, we even regress. If you’ve ever spent time with one of your limbs bound in a cast or otherwise immobilized, you’ve seen evidence of this when that limb healed and was returned to use. It wasn’t the injury that made it weaker. It was the lack of use. Or lack of exposure to any external stress. Use it or lose it.
Exercise is a form of stress. Whether it’s a heavy lift, a long run, or a bendy yoga session. It’s a stress. I can’t stress that enough.
Before I go any further, let’s define what stress is. Stress is anything real or perceived that increases your energy production and disrupts your body’s homeostatic balance. For those of you who slept through biology class, Homeostasis is how your body keeps your internal environment within specific parameters. Body temp 98.6, blood pH 7.35-7.45, blood sugar 70-100 mg/dL etc.
Whether it’s mental or physical. Pleasant (eustress) or unpleasant (distress) your body has a similar biological response. Pupils dilate, heart rate increases, your adrenal gland releases cortisol, and you receive a boost of adrenaline. Your fight or flight response has been triggered. Sympathetic systems a go!
Remember, with both physical and mental stress, the biological response is similar. Your body prepares for action. Stress becomes problematic when you stay in this state for an extended period of time without a resolution, or a physical expression. And if there’s too much physical expression without adequate recovery. i.e. road raging daily on your way to the office. Or ego lifting session after session.
Recovery is the process of restoring your body’s homeostatic balance. And driving energy towards adapting to the stress that disrupted it in the first place. The adaptations during recovery are driven by your parasympathetic system.
Stress = Sympathetic | Recovery = Parasympathetic
Energy
A common thread between both stress and recovery is that they both require energy. Stress is Catabolic and Sympathetic driven. Meaning it uses energy to break down molecules to produce action. Recovery is Anabolic and Parasympathetic driven. Meaning it uses energy to repair, rebuild and store energy.
The key to recovering better is managing how you’re using your energy any given day, as well as the type and amount of stress you use to elicit a response.
BMR Energy Expenditure Breakdown % kcal
Metabolism is how your body converts food to the energy needed to fuel your day-to-day activities AND converts food to the building blocks you need to rebuild your tissues. kcal or calories are the unit of measure for tracking this energy intake and expenditure. At rest your body uses a certain amount of energy (kcal) to maintain all of its vital functions. This is called your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). You can calculate your BMR here.
This is the minimum amount of kcal you’ll run through on a daily basis. Add some stress and energy production ramps up driving energy to support dealing with that stressor.
Now a kcal is just a unit of measure of energy. A means of tracking the amount of energy available in the food we eat. And tracking the amount of energy we burn at rest and during activity. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the compound your body uses as the “currency” for ALL of your activities, both voluntary and involuntary. It’s nicknamed a currency because you spend it! The breaking down of ATP is what produces the energy to fund movement.
To keep moving or to live essentially, you need to keep generating ATP, as there is only so much readily available for use. Our bodies are old school. It only takes cash, and you can only carry so much cash on hand.
Phosphate National Bank
Lift something heavy or move very quickly, this is largely an anaerobic effort. Cover distance at slow speeds or simply stand there and do nothing, is largely an aerobic effort. Without getting too deep into energy systems, understand a couple things. Anaerobic (without oxygen) means your body does not use oxygen in the process of replenishing ATP. Aerobic (with oxygen) means that it does. The aerobic system produces more ATP but takes longer. The anaerobic system produces less but is faster. Sticking with the financial analog, anaerobic is like a fast cash withdrawal from an ATM. Aerobic is like going into the bank and completing your transaction with a teller.
The energy used for recovery, as you may have surmised, is provided by ONLY your aerobic system and recovery only happens while you’re in a parasympathetic state. This means the sooner you can bring down your sympathetic system and bring your parasympathetic system up after a set or a session, the sooner you’ll start recovering. And the more efficient your aerobic system is the faster you’ll recover.
One more thing before I give you some tips to improve your recovery.
There’s a limit to the amount of energy you can burn each day sustainably over time without repercussions. Like your body taking energy away from vital functions. This is called your metabolic ceiling which is 2.5 times your BMR.
Knowing that the amount of energy you can produce is not infinite, you have to have a strategy to improve the outcome of your efforts.
Here’s 7 ways to do that.
1. Breathe through your nose. Every day, all day. In an effort to reduce the amount of stress that your brain perceives you can think happy thoughts. Or you can also stop breathing with your mouth. Mouth breathing is shallow, with air only reaching your upper lungs, barely. There are panic receptors up there that are being triggered with every shallow breath you take, telling your brain it’s go time. Breathing through your nose is a simple thing you can do to avoid any unneeded sympathetic activity.
2. Organize your training. Whether the focus is strength, endurance, hypertrophy or weight loss, organize your training sessions into three categories. Light, Medium and Heavy. This can refer to volume, time, weight etc. The important part is waving the load of an objective measure from session to session. However, if you’re feeling off, or your HRV and recovery is low, make it an automatic light day if any.
3. Build your aerobic system. This might be a shock if you know me, being a StrongFirst guy saying do cardio. But it’s strong, first. Not, strong only. There’s balance! Steady state cardio aka Zone 2 (60-70% HRM) 4-6 days a week, 20-40 minutes a day. Walk, jog, hike, cycle, swim etc. Any easy way to get this done is walking or biking to work a few days a week. The goal is to increase your hearts stroke volume and your vascular network. Not run a marathon. Unless of course you’re training to run a marathon.
4. Reset between sets. Resets are neurological resets that are great for bringing you into a parasympathetic state. Diaphragmatic breathing, head control, rolling, rocking and midline crossing movements are the big 5. An example of this could be between sets of KB swings, nasal breathing while touching your right hand to left knee, then left hand to right knee in a marching pattern (Cross Crawl). Syncing your breath to your movement.
5. Add a Cool Down as a part of your sessions. To get a jumpstart on your recovery, a proper cool down will get your parasympathetic system going to start the recovery process. It should include Resets, dynamic stretches and an anatomical breathing match (inhale on extension, exhale on flexion). The goal is to bring your heart rate back down to near resting before carrying on with the rest of your day. Check out my Breathe Down Cooldown here.
6. Establish boundaries around your session and stop if you cross them. At StrongFirst we call these stop signs. Hitting any is an indicator that you’ve reached your limit. Not the limit of what you can do, but the limit of what you’ll recover from, positively. Decrease in rep speed, change in technique, failing the talk test before the start of a set are some examples of stop signs. Your method of training will determine your stop sign. The key is having an objective boundary, and don’t cross it.
7. Sleep. This is where the bulk of your adaptions are happening during recovery. And is the most important of these seven. Aim for 8 hrs a night. If you’re a parent and just lol’d at that, I get it, I’m a parent as well. It’ll be alright. Nap when you can and scale back your sessions. The time for setting world records will come again, but for now work to maintain.
Recap
Exercise is a stress that signals your body to first handle the stress which is sympathetic driven. Then to recover and adapt to the stress, which parasympathetic driven.
Your body responds the same to mental and physical stress. (Prepares for action)
Both require energy (kcal) which is finite. Managing your energy is crucial in developing your fitness.
Recovery only happens through the parasympathetic and aerobic systems.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of more equals better and that if you don’t give your all session after session that you’re cheating yourself and you’ll never hit your goals. This is the biggest lie in fitness. Truth is, there’s a time for giving it your all and that’s during competition, or in an emergency situation. That’s displaying your fitness. Building, is a process of stress and recover. Emphasis on recover.
Coach Adam