Recovery After Exercise: Being At Your Best Day In Day Out Requires Effective Recovery

The ability to continue to train day after day, week after week, without flagging or injury comes down to lots of factors, but for me the most important of which is recovery. If you finish a hard ride, set of intervals, race or even endurance ride and simply stop you probably aren't giving your body the best chance to repair damage done by the next time you ride. Of course recovery is a very personal choice. I have a set way to recover which I know is different to my cycling peers, that doesn't mean that I am right and they are wrong or vice versa but that I have found my body works better following a different regime.

I'll start with immediately after an event, session or ride. The first thing I do is sink a recovery shake. I go for one with a high amount of carbohydrates with protein and other vitamins. You can shop around and try a few out to decide which one suits you best, again another personal preference. Once I've drank my shake I do one of a few other things depending on if I've finished a race and am away from home, or a ride or training session and am at home. If I'm at home I'll clean my bike and then jump in shower, following that I'll stretch and eat. If I'm at an event I'm unable to shower and clean my bike so I go straight into stretching (I do still clean myself and my bike - when at home!).

Stretching will untighten any firm muscles and help increase blood circulation to them. This will reduce muscle soreness and injury risk. Some riders' do a specific cool-down session on the bike or a turbo trainer. This will be a reverse of a warm-up the idea being to reduce heart rate and relax muscles in a similar way to stretching. I don't do an exact regime I just finish an event or ride by dropping to an easy gear and spinning my legs out. This should help to flush out any lactic acid build up. Again this element of recovery is very important if you want to train again the next day.

What people do on rest days, or as I call them recovery days, is again a very personal thing. I, as the change in day name suggests, do a recovery session. If you know your maximum heart rate or maximum minute power you can use simple calculation to work out at what percentage of these you need to train below in order for it to be a recovery ride. If you are training using power you should remain at less than 35% of your maximum and with heart rate you need to be below 60%. If you can use both this will ensure you remain in what is called the recovery zone. Training any higher than these will mean you are causing unnecessary strain on your muscles, they will not be recovering. I thoroughly believe you should do all recovery rides indoors, you are unable to monitor rides outside well enough to ensure you only use the recovery zones, and as said anything above this and you aren't recovering. Hills, traffic and weather will be a factor in your rides outside and all have the potential to turn a recovery ride into an endurance one. The maximum I do is a half hour recovery ride. The other option is to do nothing on your rest day, again this works for some but I find my legs are very heavy and tired after a day where I do nothing at all.

The final element of recovery is prolonged periods of rest. Sounds daunting to anyone who hasn't or doesn't take regular time off from training and racing but sometimes it is needed. A perfect example of when to take a prolonged period of rest is at the end of the cycling season. By the end you should be starting to tire, you may not realise it, and you may feel like continuing your training straight into the off season but you will struggle to maintain form throughout the winter without a rest beforehand. The issue will be that if you start to flag and your training is progressing as well as you'd like you may be forced to rest during the off season and destroying a lot of your hard work. So seriously consider taking rest between seasons. Depending on how hard you are training and what you are training for you may find that rest at other points in the season is necessary too, but this can be monitored by training progression, resting heart rates and other fitness and performance indicators.

As I say above, recovery is very much a personal element to any training program, you need to experiment with different recovery techniques and continue with those that are effective and not bother with those are not. Hopefully if you take some of this advice your training will become far more effective and your muscles less sore, win-win.


Pav Bryan - Owner & Coach

Pav Bryan Cycling Coach

Advanced Wattbike Cycling Performance & Fitness Testing, & Coaching

http://www.pavbryan.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Pav_Bryan