3 The Science of Recovery

Recovery, which is the foundation of the Four Pillars in the House of Health and Performance, is the missing link of training. Do it and your health and performance improve. Don’t do it and you risk a host of overtraining problems such as sickness, injuries, a bad attitude, and poor results.

You’re feeling a little lethargic. Unmotivated. Fatigued. Sometimes you’re tired enough to fall asleep at the drop of a hat, yet unable to sleep after you wake up in the middle of the night. True, you’ve lost weight, added muscle, and increased speed because of your workouts—but lately you’ve been a little apathetic, not looking forward to them, maybe even starting to get more colds and injuries here and there. So what’s the problem—aren’t you doing the work?

Well, maybe the problem is that you’re doing too much work—or too much of the same work. Either way, you are overtrained, and why that has happened is because you are probably shorting yourself on recovery.

Recovery is the great missing link in most training plans. Eastern European training guru Tudor Bompa famously said, “Recovery should be so well understood and actively enhanced that it becomes a fixed component of your training.” That’s because recovery is the crucial low-intensity time that your body needs to heal and rebuild itself so that it comes back stronger, more efficient than before. On the macro level, recovery includes taking it easy the days after hard workouts and taking one day off altogether every week; on the micro level, it includes paying more attention to your cooldown, stretching, and post-workout nutrition and hydration. Honor the recovery day—it’s when the benefits of your hard training are realized.

There are several ways that you can short yourself on recovery and become overtrained. You might have rushed your base training so your body is overstressed from a too-compressed Periodization schedule that didn’t give it time to gradually adapt. Or maybe you haven’t varied your training stimulus, week after week doing the same semi-hard runs, the same distance, the same hills, so not only is your body getting stale and not improving, it is always functioning with a low level of fatigue from lack of rest.

Your workouts become less productive because fatigued muscles start each workout underfueled (that is, short on glycogen, which is what carbohydrates become when stored in the muscles and liver for use as energy). Thus, you can’t produce the intensity needed in your next workout to build your fitness, yet you are not going easy enough to allow for recovery. In this manner, all your workouts become skewed to mediocrity—never going easy enough to recover and not having the energy to work hard enough to improve. Also, when you train with chronic fatigue from going too hard all the time, you cannot maintain proper running mechanics, and as mechanics break down, the risk of injury increases.

Additionally, an underrecovered body builds up too much cortisol, which is a stress hormone that makes your body store fat and water and slows down your metabolism—the opposite of your training goals. In short, depriving yourself of recovery means that you’re doing all the work but getting rewarded with poor results, injuries, and sickness.

“Working hard is easy—everyone knows how to work hard. But those who know how to work hard at recovery are the ones who win,” says my friend and mentor, coach Bob Kersee, the most successful track and field coach of all time. Fact: Athletes by nature know how to push it, but the ones who know when to throttle back perform the best. Therefore, to make sure you recover, don’t leave it to chance. Program recovery into your workout schedule and rigorously observe it.

• Falling into a Rut. Beware of doing the same thing, such as running your standard 6-mile (9.6-km) loop, every day, over and over. Your body adapts to the stress of a particular workout to the point where it is hardly stressful anymore. As a result, your workouts will no longer elicit a strong hormonal response. Instead, your hormones just say “ho-hum” and fade. To keep improving, you need to keep changing the stress every 8 weeks per the Periodization schedule outlined in chapter 4.

• Doing Too Much Too Soon. Although your breathing and organs—heart and lungs—adapt rapidly to the stress of increased exercise, your infrastructure—bones, joints, and muscles—do not. So you need the discipline to keep from going as fast as your breathing will let you; otherwise, your body’s infrastructure won’t be able to deal with the stress. In Periodization terms, you don’t want to rush the base-building phase. Don’t do any hard workouts—such as intervals or hills—on a too-shallow base.

• Going Too Hard All the Time. Some people never stop, never give themselves recovery time, and it eventually comes back to hurt them. Too much intensity—hard running, biking, skiing, you name it, sometimes on the same day—will negatively impact your health. Do not violate the hard-easy paradigm of Periodization.

Periodization training is a stepchild of recovery, born out of the need to avoid mental and physical burnout and achieve peak performance when it counts most. A well-designed Periodization program manipulates intensity (how hard you train and the volume, i.e., the total number of miles or hours you train each week), manipulating them to create the right amount of stress on the body.

As mentioned, endurance athletes’ big problem often is that their structural system (foundational infrastructure such as tendons, bone, and fascia) can’t handle the high training load necessary to take them to their peak. Additionally, the metabolic system can be overtaxed and weakened with an inappropriate balance of stress and recovery.

Other examples of foundational structures enhanced by base building include your skeleton, joints, and muscles, all of which help maintain form and economy of motion as you run, translating to fewer injuries and easier, faster recovery. It’s the same story with the enhanced fat-burning metabolism you develop during base training; a lower production of lactic acid and waste products along with a lessened reliance on carbohydrates as fuel makes bonking, or hitting a wall, and cannibalizing muscle less likely, again allowing for a faster recovery.

Need I say it again? Better recovery today translates to the ability to work harder tomorrow.

Active recovery is better than rest alone. There is nothing passive about recovery. Yes, you can get some recovery by sitting on the couch and eating Cheetos the day after a hard workout. But the best recovery is an active process in which light “adaptation” workouts, such as an easy-paced run, swim, bicycle ride, or even walk, stimulate recovery better than rest alone. Light workouts are akin to the self-cleaning oven, in which the heat is turned up but no roast is placed inside. They provide the body the same opportunity to do housecleaning functions without having to recover from the damaging effects of a new workout. Light exercise increases circulation, releases testosterone and other recovery hormones, and activates “heat shock” proteins in the body to repair damaged muscles and tissues. These processes are only set in place when you heat up the body from the inside out with light exercise (sorry, hot tubs don’t work because external heat only increases inflammation instead of decreasing it). Similar occurrences improve connective tissue and bone repair as well. The danger is letting the active recovery workout become too strenuous.

Variety also furthers what you might call “mental recovery”—helping you keep focus and motivation high and avoiding mental burnout.

Stretching provides the body the range of motion that is required around the joints for the correct running biomechanics and minimizes the damage created during workouts. Workouts are far more productive when unencumbered by the tightness that would otherwise occur following hard exercise.

Static stretching exercises, in which you hold a position while motionless, are the best for zapping stiffness and elongating tissues. Don’t rely on a “dynamic” warm-up (a new trend that involves active range-of-motion movements, as opposed to static stretching) or a slow jog to start your workout. Although these can be part of your warm-up, they are not substitutes for static stretching.

Ice isn’t just for injuries—it is essential to all of your recovery efforts. By controlling runaway inflammation, it helps your body adapt in more functional ways to the stress of your workouts. Although inflammation is the first essential step in the body’s structural repair and improvement process, science has shown that it can be excessive; by overriding it with icing, we speed up recovery, enabling you to work hard again sooner. Ice helps avoid injuries and treats minor irritations (microtrauma) before they develop into overuse syndromes (macrotrauma). Icing and ice baths reduce levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that stalls your metabolic recovery.

Put ice cubes and water in a plastic, zippered bag or commercial bag with rubber on the inside and cloth covering outside and apply to tight and sore areas for 20 minutes once or twice a day to relieve tightness or soreness. Gel packs are not as effective.

Compression top and tights

This is the time to feed your sweet tooth with high-glycemic (sugary) carbohydrates to begin rebuilding your glycogen stores. (Technically, the sugary stuff releases insulin from your pancreas, which opens the windows in the muscles to absorb carbs and protein.) Fruit and any sweets will do except for chocolate, which has too much fat, slowing the rate at which the carbs will leave your stomach and arrive at your depleted muscles. Furthermore, research shows that food or drink with a 4-to-1 mixture of carbs to protein (a ratio pioneered by Endurox, made by Pacific Health Labs, which we’ve successfully tested on our athletes) stimulates a larger insulin reaction and speeds recovery. Within an hour, follow up with a balanced meal of carbs, protein, and fat. Then continue to graze until you feel satiated. In this way, you can reach full glycogen recovery within 4 hours, whereas if you missed the 15-minute window, it can take up to 24 hours to restore glycogen levels in the liver and muscles.

Back-to-back long or difficult workouts can create a constant glycogen-depleted state, which hampers muscle function and leads to a breakdown in running mechanics and produces more stress and injuries.

WATER WORKOUTS WORK WONDERS

In 1987, just 3 weeks before the Track and Field World Championships in Rome, Italy, Florence “Flo-Jo” Griffith went down with a grade II hamstring strain. Grade II is not as bad as a full-blown muscle tear (that’s grade III), but it’s bad enough to destroy your hopes in an event that close and set you back for months, especially if you’re a world-class athlete. Florence was limping, suffering swelling and sudden flashes of pain, and experiencing deep pain when I pressed in on the hamstring muscle and tried to bend her knee against resistance.

Yet she ended up doing great at the Worlds. That’s because we used water running, a remarkably valuable recovery tool that all runners—injured or not—should take advantage of.

Combining flotation with hydrostatic pressure, running in the water gives you a nearly impact-free workout with six times the resistance you experience while moving through the air; that allows you to rehab and strengthen still-healing body parts while maintaining fitness and form.

In Flo-Jo’s case, we had to act fast to fix her hamstring, maintain fitness, and keep her confidence up for the Worlds, a key pre-Olympic event. This wouldn’t be easy. Athletes like her are finely tuned machines, and removing her from the track and missing the all-important tapering and peaking phase of training would normally leave her at a subpar level.

So I proceeded with the PRICE protocol for acute injuries. After we got inflammation under control with ice, ultrasound, and electric stimulation, I began administering cross-fiber friction massage to break up dysfunctional scar tissue that formed in the injured muscle. Once Florence could walk without pain, I supported her thigh with a self-grip compression wrap and got her in the pool at my clinic in Santa Monica. At first, because it even hurt for her to perform the running motion in the water, I had her do a “wooden soldier” water walking exercise, in which she imitated walking like a wooden soldier with straight arms and legs while she was held afloat by a foam device around her waist. This workout is harder than water running because of the drag created by the increased surface area of the outstretched extremities.

After a few more days of two-a-day physical therapy treatments, Florence was able to run in the water without pain, so we began matching her workouts in the water to the workouts her teammates were doing on that track. If Coach Kersee called for the other 200-meter sprinters on his team to do 3 × 400 meters at a 53-second pace with a rest interval of 1 minute, and then 3 × 200 meters at a 23-second pace with 30 seconds of rest, we did the same times in the pool. We matched workout for workout with the team.

Within 2 weeks, Florence was ready to return part-time to the track. After 1 week of workouts on the UCLA track, augmented by more pool workouts at my office, we traveled to Italy and continued treatments to restore full strength and flexibility and clear up the last bit of scar tissue.

Robert Forster working with Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee doing a water workout.

At the Worlds, Florence not only ran three heats of the 200-meter dash and the final without pain, but won the silver medal with a personal record of 21.96 (losing to East German sprint stalwart Silke Gladisch). But she wasn’t done yet! Two days and lots of massages later, she ran a leg of the U.S. women’s gold-medal-winning 4 × 100-meter relay.

If you’re scratching your head over this, join the crowd. Two weeks of missed workouts on the track after suffering an injury that can end a sprinter’s career and Florence runs her best time ever on her way to the silver medal and a gold medal? And she outperformed most of her teammates, too. How could this happen?

Well, I like to think my physical therapy techniques helped speed the healing of her injury, but the water was the key. Why? Probably a bit overtrained by a young coach Kersee, Florence’s forced time off and the restorative benefits of the water workouts helped her recover a bit more than the others and peak when it counted. To be fair, her teammate Jackie Joyner-Kersee won double gold in both the heptathlon and the long jump events, soundly beating the Russians and Germans. But Jackie was in my office three times per week for recovery massage and preventive treatments even when she wasn’t injured. In fact, the frequency of visits to my office for restorative therapies correlates exactly with the number of Olympic medals won by any individual on our team. Jackie came into the office the most and won the most medals (six); Florence was next in number of visits and she won five; and Gail Devers was third in the number of visits and won three Olympic gold medals.

After 1987, water workouts (which I ended up cowriting a book about, The Complete Waterpower Workout Book) became a fixed component of our training and rehabilitation programs for all our clients. We found that runners can exploit the hydrostatic pressure that water exerts on their submerged bodies to facilitate recovery during low impact water workouts, or they can do high-powered intervals in the pool to gain the benefits and not the wear and tear. Also, because the water provides six times the resistance that your extremities encounter moving through the air, water workouts strengthen the hip flexors, core, and glutes to facilitate better mechanics and efficiency. The pool is a great environment for plyometric power workouts too, because the soft landings spare the joints from the otherwise extreme stress of these power moves when done on land. This is key for older runners who miss the benefits from the bounding and jumping work done in plyometric training because their joints can’t take the pounding.

So, you know that pool in your backyard or at the gym that you never use because you don’t like swimming? It’s a key to happiness for all runners.