Chapter 16: Rise stronger - A comprehensive guide to maximizing your health, recovery & training response
This chapter stands out as the most crucial one yet—it's the cornerstone of the entire book. Why? Because without recovery, there's no progress. It's not just a cliché; it's a physiological truth! In my 30 years of coaching and dedicated studies, I've witnessed it repeatedly. Athletes with poor recovery simply don’t improve, while those with robust recovery not only improve but thrive!
It's not just about recovery limiting an athlete's workload, though that's a significant factor in terms of injury risk, illness risk, consistency, and training intensity. Even when workloads are matched, athletes with weak recovery profiles improve significantly less than those with strong recovery profiles.
Think of it like this: the difference in training effectiveness between an athlete who prioritizes recovery and one who doesn't is comparable to the gap between a craftsman working with blunt tools and one with sharp ones. Everything takes longer and is less effective for the former. Just as a seasoned craftsman knows the importance of investing time in sharpening tools for a good job, athletes must recognize the value of proper recovery for optimal performance.
Tweet 16.1: “A craftsman must sharpen his tools to do his job”
When athletes neglect to care for and sharpen their tools, achieving results requires a lot more hard work and "elbow grease." If they persist without proper maintenance, no amount of effort will yield the desired outcome. This aligns with our earlier discussion on training response differences in the previous chapter...
Moreover, just like a craftsman neglecting tool care, athletes face consequences. Broken tools mean more downtime spent on frequent “repairs”, negatively impacting their training productivity.
Yes, in a very real way….
It is the actions you take in the 20+ hours away from training each day, that will determine the actual fitness benefit that you get from the training.
We have looked at how to go about monitoring these things – readiness for work and training response in previous chapters. However, we didn’t go deeply into how to improve them. So, that will be the mission of this chapter – to help you improve your own recovery profile so that you recover more quickly after loading and so that you get the most performance “bang” for your training “buck”. But before we do that, let’s take a deeper look at some of the implications of poor vs strong recovery on your performance as an athlete, a topic that has been on my mind for a very long time…
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