In the last chapter we took a deep dive into weekly planning. One of the key considerations, perhaps *the* key consideration, for planning what goes where within the week is the question – is today a loading day or a recovery day? More specifically, is the athlete in a good position to benefit from training load today?
When I first arrived at the Australian Institute of Sport many years ago, the head swim coach at the time was a guy named Bill Sweetenham. Coming straight from my graduate work in training planning and periodization, I had a lot of questions for Bill about the way that the training was cycled – what “microcycle patterns” did he use with the National team? 1:1? 2:1? What days were the designated “unload” days of the week? His response completely blew my mind and made me rethink everything that I thought I knew about training…
“We don’t plan recovery. We take it when we need it.”
This idea of “recovery on demand” is something that I embraced and something that I use to this very day. It is, at its root, about as “common sensical” as you could possibly get – we rest when we’re tired! And yet, like so many things, this level of common sense is decidedly uncommon in the real world!
While we have a lot of additional assistance these days from technology in helping to better answer the questions “is the athlete tired?” “how tired is ‘tired’ enough?”, which we will explore in this chapter, the principle is the same as what Bill was teaching all of those years ago – work the athlete when they are in a position to benefit from work, and rest them when they are not.
The roots of this simple principle are decidedly physiological…
Training represents an ongoing alternation between – create a stimulus for growth, be it growth of the muscle fiber itself or cellular components within & around the muscle – mitochondria, capillaries etc, then *rest* and let the growth occur…
All stimulus & no rest means no growth, NO IMPROVEMENT!
At any given time, the athlete is at one of those 2 points on the load-recovery curve – either at the trough of the cycle, with high levels of fatigue (training-induced or otherwise), low energy, muscle damage etc, in a position to rest, recover & grow from the load, or at the peak of the cycle, with high energy, minimal muscle damage & low fatigue, ready for another dose of training load to start the cycle all over again, i.e. in a good position to benefit from training load.
Figure 13.1: The most important question – where are you, right now, on the cycle?
There are 2 key components to being in ‘a good position to benefit from training load’.
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