The Two Most Important Recovery Methods For Athletes
Ice baths, expensive recovery drinks, foam rollers, and stretching are just a few things that we hear about when it comes to recovery from our runs. Yes, recovery is so important! It is so important that it should be treated as part of your training. Activity (running, swimming, weight lifting, etc) is the stimulus, but without recovery, that activity can only take us so far as athletes. Recovering well helps us to prevent injuries and improve our athletic abilities.
So, do we need to spend a bunch of money on fancy recovery gear and supplements? Should we jump in the frigid ice bath? There is plenty of mixed research that could help support or negate claims for most of these things. However, there are two proven strategies that are the most important part of your recovery process. You’ll be shocked at the low cost and ease of implementing them!
SLEEP
It is completely free and hopefully everyone is doing this every single night: sleep! This is arguably the most important part of recovery for athletes. When you are sleeping a cascade of hormones are released that aid in tissue repair and help muscles adapt to training stimuli. You also achieve cognitive rest, which is pretty important for athletic performance.
Research has shown that athletes have a greater time to fatigue (meaning it will take you longer to hit the wall) when they get a proper amount of sleep. Their risk for injury is lower and immune systems are better. I am certainly not an expert in sleep, but the research is clear that a proper amount of sleep is absolutely imperative if you want to be the best athlete you can be!
So how much sleep should you aim for?
Experts recommend 7-9 hours each night; however, high level athletes may need even more than this! Don’t be concerned if you get one bad night of sleep. That is part of life! However, we want to aim for mostly good sleep. If you are anything like me, you won’t sleep well the night before a big race. However, if you are sleeping well leading up to that time, you will be just fine!
Here are a few tips to maximize great sleep:
- Avoid caffeine after 12PM.
- Keep a consistent bed-time and wake-time, even on the weekends!
- Avoid looking at your phone right before bed.
- Beware of supplements that tout great sleep. Many of these are unregulated by the FDA and you may not even be getting what the package claims.
- Make your sleeping area cool, quiet, and dark. If you are going to a big city to run a race, I recommend bringing a sound machine with you. This can help drown out noise that people are making outside of your hotel room who clearly are not taking part in the race the next morning!
- Don’t try to go to bed early when you aren’t even tired. This can backfire causing you to toss and turn.
- If you can’t get to sleep, try getting out of bed and reading a book (not on a device, read from actual paper to avoid blue light!) or doing something else relaxing until you start to feel sleepy. However, from my ample experience of being unable to sleep before big races, I will often just stay in bed and enjoy the rest. Now that this has happened enough times, I don’t panic. I remind myself that I’m still resting my body and that I have run many races on little sleep, so I can do it again! Sometimes you just have to know what works best for you in a given situation.
Please prioritize your sleep. It is essential on so many levels. In this day and age, we value working ourselves to death and burning the candle at both ends. Let us stop this! To be great people AND great athletes, we need to schedule sleep as a non-negotiable. Yes, there will be that time you are up with your sick child or something like that. However, keep in mind how many hours you have in a day and how many hours commitments take. Cut yourself off from taking on extra commitments when it cuts into your precious sleep!
NUTRITION
The second most important part of recovery is your nutrition! I’ll try to keep this brief because obviously I could go on about this topic forever! If you want to avoid injury and be the best athlete you can be, you have to take nutrition seriously. This doesn’t mean that you have to over-analyze everything that goes into your mouth. Please don’t do that! However, we have to be mindful about our nutrition in a way that supports our health and athleticism.
Right now, you might be wondering which awesome supplement I’m going to recommend. Which recovery drink on the market is the best?? While some of these recovery drinks may have a place, they are absolutely unnecessary! The best nutrition you will ever get comes from whole foods.
Here are a few basic tips for recovery nutrition, but know that it goes much deeper than this:
- Consume carbohydrates within 30 minutes of finishing a hard effort of activity. You should be getting about 1-1.2 grams of carbohydrate for every kilogram of body weight. This is crucial for replacing glycogen stores in the muscle. Endurance athletes rely heavily on glycogen stores!
- Within 2-3 hours of completing a hard effort, consume 15-25 grams of protein, more if you are vegetarian.
- Drink 16-24 ounces of fluid for every pound lost during the hard effort. Some of this fluid can be restored through foods with a high water content. Coffee does count!
- Overall, your diet should include a variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein. You need fat, carbohydrates, and protein! Yes, all three macronutrients are crucial for health and being the best athlete you can be!
- Creating a calorie deficit during high volume training can be a recipe for disaster. Your body needs nutrients to repair itself!
While this is a very basic overview, I hope it will shed light on these two very simple but imperative pieces of your recovery. Yes, there are other pieces to this puzzle that may be of value but sleep and nutrition will give you the biggest reward.