July 2007 -- Question: I continue to hear the word recovery discussed in seminars. However, I hear it referred to in many ways. There seems to be recovery by taking days off from playing, recovery between matches, recovery on the changeover, and even recovery between points. Can you clarify what recovery means in these various situations?
Answer: In the past, training only referred to the time spent actively preparing for competition. This involved fitness training, movement development, stroke development and so on. It then included areas like mental toughness training. Recovery wasn’t discussed very much and, in fact, was somewhat viewed as a sign of weakness. However, research over the past half century has led sport scientists and coaches to realize that recovery is an extremely important component of training in today’s world.
Since the early 20th century, exercise physiologists have measured how quickly a person’s heart rate "recovered" to resting rate as a sign of that person’s level of fitness. From there, recovery has taken on many forms, which have been described as macrocycles of recovery (time off, a day off in a training week, sleep, etc.) and microcycles of recovery (time between points, time during changeovers, and possibly the hour between matches during a weekend tournament).
I will respond to your question in two parts, discussing the macrocycle in this column and then microcycles of recovery in my next column. First, let’s discuss what a macrocycle represents.
In the ’70s and ’80s, sport scientists in the United States (much later than in some other countries) began studying how an athlete’s performance could be enhanced by understanding (even to the point of controlling) his competitive schedule. This was introduced in the Olympics by helping these world-class performers "peak" at the right time. But, that was fairly easy compared to a competitive tennis schedule. The Olympian (especially in track and field) had to peak at two primary times - the Olympic trials and at the Olympics themselves. Sport scientists began truly understanding what overtraining and undertraining meant, as well as the associated symptoms. They started helping athletes manage their schedules in order to work on certain things during part of the year, prepare to compete, and actually plan to create an environment of peaking at the right time. This has been called periodization.
A periodization schedule has a season of preparation when the athlete trains to improve skills and conditioning, a precompetitive phase when the athlete begins tapering off, a competitive phase when the athlete hopes to peak, and then a phase of active rest when the athlete recovers from the training/competitive schedule. This time off from the sport, or active rest, is usually not just a day at the beach but is time off from the athlete’s normal training routines. It provides the athlete with tremendous physiological and psychological recovery.
This differs from just taking a day off during a training week. In the active rest phase of a periodization schedule, the athlete might definitely take a few days totally off from activity but, over the duration of the active rest cycle, will usually keep his or her level of fitness relatively high.
In contrast, taking a day off during a training week might actually be a day off. That day, the athlete might only stretch or do some very light activity but it is to be a day of rest so the body can repair itself physically. There are psychological benefits to a day off as well. To keep an athlete training under stress continuously day after day is considered a major mistake in today’s world of athletic performance.
And, what about during the 24-hour cycle of a day? Sleep, for example, is considered the No. 1 mechanism that the body uses for recovery with nutrition being No. 2. Although some might lump sleep into a microcycle of recovery, let’s discuss it here. We learned something very interesting about sleep in a practical way at the Human Performance Institute during our work with hostage rescue teams in law enforcement. When a rescue team goes into action in a hostage situation, the No. 1 strategy is to take away recovery time from the captors. The team will play loud music, or unleash a barrage of gunfire or bombing all around the site with the sole purpose of keeping the captors awake. Then food and water supplies are cut off. The armchair quarterback in us hears this and we think the strategy is to starve and dehydrate the captors. However, long before this happens, something more important to the mission takes place. When a human being is deprived of sleep or food/water, that person will make mistakes. And that is what law enforcement is after - mistakes, on the part of the captors. Referencing this to competition in sport, mistakes are easy to make if the athlete isn’t sleeping well or maintains poor nutrition.
Regarding sleep, we know this. If you need to be "on" tomorrow, you need at least seven to eight hours of sleep tonight. We often hear people respond to this statement with, "I do just fine on six hours of sleep." We have to tell these individuals that they are not doing "fine" but that they are merely surviving and that they may have trained their bodies to "survive" by accommodating six hours of sleep. Research has demonstrated that it takes at least seven hours of sleep (for most people) for complete protein synthesis to occur in the brain. Athletes with poor sleep cycles will struggle under competitive duress.
The nutrition I want to note in this column is not the prematch meal, postmatch meal, or sport-specific hydration (I will discuss these in Part 2), but the actual nutrition status of the athlete. Skipping breakfast is easy to do in our society, as is consuming a poor variety of foods and not drinking enough water. All can lead to poor blood glucose levels, vitamin/mineral deficiencies, and poor hydration status in general. Again, we can train our bodies to survive on this way of eating/drinking but we are not thriving in this fashion. As coaches, we should advise our athletes that they can definitely train their bodies to tolerate eating in certain ways that are not physiologically sound. However, if the nutritional or physiological foundation of the athlete is poor, the athlete’s performance could suffer.
The basic advice in these areas is to develop proper rituals. Eating breakfast, having a variety of foods in meals, and drinking about two liters (eight cups) of water per day are all a good start to creating a sound foundation. Athletes should also look at their rituals before going to sleep. Do they have something in place (e.g., reading a book, etc.) that will let their mind know it is time to rest? They also need to avoid overscheduling themselves in practices and in competition. The word "optimum" comes to mind here, not the word "maximum." In other words, to maximize performance, one has to optimize one’s schedule.
In my next column I will continue this discussion into the microcycles of recovery and how an understanding of these can aid an athlete between points, on changeovers, and in the short time intervals between matches in weekend tournaments.
Send questions to jgroppel@LGEPerformance.com.
