Recovery gives your mind and body the time to rejuvenated, recharge, rebuild and repair. It gives you the fuel, calmness and strength you need to endure athletic challenges and succeed. You cannot expect to train effectively without giving yourself ample recovery! If you do not recover you WILL overtrain!
I recently experienced a lack of recover and some overtraining. I realized I was constantly tired, felt lethargic, my mood was low, my energy was low, I felt like I was getting sick and I wasn't enjoying my training. All signs that I was missing something...RECOVERY! Again recovery is 3 fold: physical, mental and emotional. After experiencing this I finally realized what was going on. My body was trying to tell me something...it needed recovery! I just wasn't listening and it got louder and louder as I got more fatigued, more "out of it" and less excited about training. When you don't listen to you body it simply amps up what its trying to tell you until you listen.
So what did I do to recover? I started paying attention! Paying attention is key! What was my body telling me...what did I need physically, mentally and emotionally? As I asked myself these questions it all became clear. I discovered I needed to make sleep and rest a priority, so I made a point to work on getting to bed earlier and getting a better training/rest routine. I discovered my water intake was way too low, so I upped my water intake and added vitamin C to my water because I felt my immune system was down due to the intensity of my training. I discovered I needed something other than training to occasionally focus on, so I started reading more. These and a couple other little things put together over only a few short days made a dramatic impact on my overall well-being. I felt more alert, stronger, excited, and focused. I had been neglecting my needs and my body was not having it!
With all this said learning to listen to and honor what your body needs is not easy task. You must decide you are important enough to take of your needs. You must make yourself and your health a priority. You must want to succeed in the ring (or whatever your sport is) enough to give you body exactly what it needs vs what you want (as needs and wants can conflict with each other). This is such an important part of training that often gets neglected and needs much more of your attention. Coach Bob and I are here to help you understand and incorporate recovery into your training program. Our goal at Warrior is to help you train as effectively as possible and guide you towards success in and out of the ring.
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This is an awesome topic. Recovery is such a vital component to seeing fitness results. I have severely over-trained in my past and could not get over my frustration as to why I wasn't seeing any gains.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, sometimes people get the mindset that you have to always train "harder", when sometimes all you have to do is train "smarter"...meaning, you have to think about your fitness routine, as a whole. There are many moving parts to a solid fitness program: the physical activity (your workout), how you fuel your body - before and after, how often and in what ways do you recover and rebuild your body, and how do you evolve your program to continually challenge the muscle.
I can not say this enough - rest and recovery is a huge part of seeing results; especially if you are training hard at Warrior. Think of it this way: how you rest and recover outside of the gym is just as important as what you do in the gym. It's synergistic and very related to each other.