#101 Recovering better

A big training session will only have an effect if it is followed by good recovery. Let's not forget that the sole purpose of training is to stress our organism. This stress then pushes the body to adapt during the rest phases, in case the beating comes back. In the end, muscles and bones grow stronger at rest. It is possible to improve your rest phases to recover better, and it starts with dropping Netflix, beer and chips. Training mainly produces two effects:

Recovery therefore comes through resolving these two points. The tools at our disposal are sleep, nutrition, massages and active recovery sessions.

Sleep

Benefits of a good night

The positive impacts are numerous. First of all, the brain takes advantage of our nights to sort through the day's information, increasing its capacity for concentration and its memory. The body also takes the opportunity to produce white blood cells and growth hormones. White blood cells contribute to the good health of the immune system (and therefore ours). Growth hormones, produced in very large majority during our sleep, are essential for repairing the body (skin, muscle tissue, bone strengthening, etc.). These hormones are produced during the phases of REM sleep (paradoxical sleep) appearing late in our night. The longer our sleep, the more REM phases there will be. Short nights, on the other hand, de facto minimize REM sleep and therefore muscle recovery. All this stresses the body, which starts producing cortisol, the stress hormone. This cortisol has the effect of degrading tissue regeneration, adding yet another layer to our poor recovery.

Sleep quality and training

The type of session we do impacts the quality of our sleep. The more intensive the training, the more the sympathetic system takes over from the parasympathetic. Lack of sleep is common when doing intense training sessions, which partly explains why it is a good indicator of overtraining. It does not take much to disturb sleep; an increase in load over a few days is enough to impact our recovery capacities. Several avenues can increase the quality of your sleep during intensive phases:

How to sleep longer

It is a fact, the French do not sleep enough: 6 h 40 on average over 2020. That is 1 h 30 less than the ideal duration (8 h and more). Experts think this continuing fall in sleep time is due to the stress of our hyped-up daily lives and to screen exposure. Cities have also become noisier and brighter at night. Fortunately, countermeasures exist. Increasing your sleep is possible by playing on two levers: our bedroom and our habits. If we consider that recovery goes hand in hand with training, then our bedroom becomes our second gym. This room must allow us to isolate ourselves from noise (double glazing, absorbing panels, etc.) and from light (blackout curtains, removal of lights inside). All this insulation minimizes the risk of waking during the night. Another trick is to keep the temperature around 18 °C. Finally, the bedding is essential, with a quality mattress, a pillow suited to your morphology, and sheets that are pleasant to the touch. The investment can be substantial, but let's not forget that we spend a third of our lives here. Then come our habits. The ideal routine for minimizing the time it takes to fall asleep is to eat at least 2 hours before sleeping and to always go to bed at the same times. It is also useful to define a window within which you intend to get as much sleep as possible. This window must be wider than the targeted sleep time (a 9-hour window, for example, for an 8-hour night).

Monitoring your sleep

Measuring your sleep (and its quality) also helps improve it. Just having access to your sleep time and its components naturally encourages you to correct course, if need be. The solutions for measuring your sleep are far from perfect. But perfection is not a goal in itself; just having an idea is enough to make progress. Mountain watches with a barometer and GPS generally sit in the high-end segment, and most of them include a sleep-tracking feature. Apart from COROS, the models of interest to us at GARMIN, POLAR and SUUNTO offer such measurements. Otherwise the market offers many sensors or wristbands with this option, for every budget, with varying degrees of success. But how do they manage to estimate our sleep? The most basic rely on motion sensors, supplemented next by a heart rate sensor. Since heart rate decreases during rest, the electronics can estimate fairly precisely the moment you start sleeping, as well as the moment you get up. The breakdown into phases is then estimated from heart rate variability, but there, the marketing starts entering a gray area…

Nutrition and recovery

Nutrition is often the great forgotten factor among beginner athletes. Effective nutrition puts the body in the best conditions to absorb training and allow the muscles and bones to adapt. Without falling into the trap of weighing everything, a rich and varied diet is essential to absorb the widest possible variety of nutrients and avoid deficiencies. Eating a bit of everything and not overdoing the good things are thus the two foundations of good nutrition. Without restricting yourself: a common source of injuries is relative energy deficiency (RED-S), which consists of cutting back meals to maintain or reduce your weight. This deficit degrades bone health, by reducing bone density and robustness, and weakens muscle tissue. Protein intake is essential to fuel the muscle repair process. It is recommended to ingest between 1.4 and 2 g/kg (140 and 200 g for a 100 kg person) per day. Ideally, the protein dose should be divided up so you eat protein every 4 hours. These proteins must come from quality nutritional sources (forget McDonald's), ideally varied ones (plant and animal). Watch out for alcohol: it is known to degrade the immune system and is thought to reduce protein synthesis. It is also recommended to watch your intake of Omega-3, good for the organism and for recovery. Vitamin D is also important, since a deficiency increases the risk of fractures and reduces the effectiveness of the immune system. Optimizing post-training recovery is a job that starts as soon as the session ends. One recommendation is to ingest 300 kcal within the first half hour of rest, 60% coming from carbohydrates and 40% from protein. Finally, watch your hydration, which will allow better synthesis of nutrients, as well as the flushing out of toxins.

Massages

Massages are a formidable tool for speeding up recovery. A professional masseur is far more effective at relieving the muscles than a machine or other stand-ins. Ten minutes of massage per day can drastically speed up recovery. But there it is: few people can afford this type of service on a daily basis. So machines and stand-ins it is. The two most widespread tools for massaging yourself are rollers (example) and massage balls (example). For a few dozen euros and around ten minutes a day, you can inflict torture sessions on yourself in order to relax the muscles. These tools help undo the knots and increase blood flow in painful muscle areas. All while allowing us to control the pressure applied. The more painful it is, the more we need massages. However, if any doubt persists as to the level of pain, nothing beats the opinion of a health professional. Stretching and yoga can also play the same role. The results, however, only become visible over the long term. Nothing stops you from combining stretching, yoga and massage, but you still need to have the time.

Active recovery

Active recovery is a method consisting of doing sport at an intensity level so low that it speeds up recovery. These sessions have no other purpose than to help us recover. They contribute nothing to the development of our fitness. The key here is to keep the intensity of the session very low. In the heart rate zone breakdown, the intensity sits at the bottom of Z0. Changing sport is also a plus to relieve the joints. A 20-minute walk, a ride on the bike or a trip to the pool are typical examples of active recovery sessions. Unless you are a high-level runner used to running several dozen hours a week, it is better to avoid doing active recovery sessions at a jog. Swimming is perhaps the best sport for recovering since it unloads the legs. It is also suspected that the water temperature and the horizontal position encourage better blood flow in the limbs. Incidentally, ice-water baths also speed up recovery by increasing blood flow. In any case, a session of this type has worked when you feel better at the end than at the beginning. Electrostimulation (COMPEX) also acts as an active recovery session. The principle consists of exciting the muscle tissue by sending an electrical signal via an electrode. This signal then passes through the skin to command the muscle's contraction. Although the claims about muscle development are debatable, these devices most often include an effective recovery mode. The good news: the basic models all offer it. The bad news: you will have to shave to fit the electrodes.