As I have touched on in previously blog posts, recovery is a vital part of training. Because training is a stress imposed on your body, the adaptations result from recovery from that stress. If I do a workout today, next week I would expect to be fully recovered to do a slightly more challenging version of the same workout again. However, if I did not give myself enough time to recover, my next workout would be hindered, and I would not be able to do progress to make it more challenging or I may even have to regress, making the workout “easier.”

To be able to ensure that you can do the same workouts week to week and progress, your training has to be enough of a stress to adapt to but not too much that you are unable to recover. Thus, recovery comes in two forms: what you do in your training and what you do outside of training. In my opinion, the more important is the former because there are limitations to what you can do outside of training. Proper sleep (usually at least 8 hours for most people), proper diet (changes depending on your goals but generally eating enough protein, vegetables, and calories), and daily movement are apart of the short list of things that will consistently work to help you recover. Diet and sleep being pretty self-explanatory for why they improve recovery, daily movement is another form that is very useful for reducing overall stress, clearing your mind, getting your joints moving, releasing stiffness, and burning calories. Any other type of “recovery” is likely just fluff. For example, massage guns that are being sold for $300+ are arguably useless and a waste of money (for a variety of reasons that I won’t delve into).

Once you cover your bases of recovery outside of training, training-related recovery is left. The reason that this is so important because it is the stress that you have to recover from. If too much, no amount of outside recovery will help because you are simply running yourself into the ground. Logically, this means that there is a sweet spot for a workout between too much and not enough. Often, this can be difficult to gauge and needs to be discovered through trial-and-error. What you can do as you try to figure this out is by starting with a small training stress–a relatively easy workout. This will allow you to build on the difficulty through volume or intensity until you hit a brick wall that you can’t recover from (i.e. a plateau–see last blog post). Then, you should deload and start from a moderate difficulty of workouts and work between that and the level that was too much.

A deload is a strategy of reducing training stress through an easy week of training. No matter what, training results in a systemic level of stress that you can’t fully recovery from workout to workout. This means that eventually, you should take a break from training to allow you to reset. How often you need a deload is highly individual and most often depends on how long it takes for you to not be able to recovery from your workouts anymore (i.e. too sore, tired, mentally exhausted, etc).

In my training, if I notice that I am just too tired before, during, and after my workouts, and am very unmotivated, I may be in need of extra recovery or a deload. Through the mistakes I have made in my training, I have previously done way too much that made it impossible to recover from. So, I reduced the amount I do each workout and added an extra rest day or two. This is part of the continuous process of modifying what I do to see what works and what doesn’t that makes training satisfying and enjoyable.