Recovery Weeks

For adaptation to occur one needs to put their body through a certain amount of physiological stress. This stress needs to increase over time for the body to see further adaptation and improvement, but there comes a time when we need to take our foot off the gas and let our bodies recover for an extended period. Now recovery weeks are different than single rest days and should be treated a little different as well. For the sake of this post we're talking about long-term fatigue accumulation (2-4 weeks) from hard training, and how and why shedding some of this fatigue is better for the athlete long-term.

As I stated previously our bodies must undergo an increasing amount of stress in order to continue to adapt and improve. However, it's not as simple as increasing the stress day after day, week after week and you'll keep getting stronger and faster until one day you're at the limit of human performance. Unfortunately as physiological stress accumulates so does fatigue, and there comes a point when fatigue is so great that you cannot effectively train and you need to "come up for air" before you can continue to pile on the training.

Before moving on it's important to reiterate the the relationship between fitness and fatigue. As an athlete increases training over the course of days and weeks, fitness will go up and so will fatigue. But when a rest day or period is taken, fatigue levels will drop off faster than fitness, so when training recommences the athlete will begin the next block with a higher fitness:fatigue ratio. Another training block is then completed and another rest period is taken. This cycle will hopefully end up bringing the athlete's fitness higher and higher while also managing fatigue levels so they do not grow excessively. Managing these fitness and fatigue levels and timing them so that the athlete comes into their key races with high levels of fitness and relatively lower levels of fatigue is what good coaching is all about. The bottom line is you cannot have fitness without fatigue, but fatigue needs to be managed at all times.

If an athlete is training effectively, single rest days are not good enough. They are necessary when managing short-term stress, but longer blocks of 5-7 days of deloading are crucial. If an athlete appropriately increases physiological stress on a weekly basis fatigue will start to accumulate, and after 2-4 weeks (depending on how hard the athlete trains and how quickly they recover) They will need to take multiple days easy.

What happens if you don't? Fitness stagnates because you can no longer increase training stress. Fatigue stays high. You are perpetually tired. You wake up sweaty at night. You get grumpy. You say something rude to a coworker. You lose your job. Trust me I've been there. Well maybe not all the way there but I've been on that road and know what it's like. And if you travel down that road further by piling on more training you end up with full-blown overtraining syndrome, shot adrenal glands, and unimaginable fatigue. And the only way to avoid it is training less, which doesn't sound that bad.

What does a rest week look like for our athletes? Basically zero intensity with a 40-50% drop in volume. I like to include 20-30 second "pick-ups" to maintain some turnover speed but other than that if an athlete is truly training hard I believe in 5-7 days of very relaxed training. Going into a rest week the athlete should be tired and craving a bit of rest, and by the end they should be chomping at the bit to get back to hard training. Now if an athlete missed a bunch of key workouts and doesn't show signs of high fatigue then we postpone the rest week.

There are lots of fancy tools to measure an athlete's fatigue levels, and I use a few of them, but in the end subjective measures are usually dependable. This emphasizes the coach-athlete relationship and why the athlete always needs to be open with how they are feeling and if they are excessively tired.