This is a collaboration with Nathan Sier. This article has also been added to the MVP Guide.
What is Recovery?
Recovery is any activity that tones down your fight or flight response and helps you rid your body of “stressors.”
You don’t get stronger from the workouts and practices, you get the increase in strength from your recovery. Adaptation begins after, not during the workout.
For these reasons, recovery is important.
Understanding your Nervous System
You probably wouldn’t care too much about your nervous system if you were learning it in school. So let’s not bore you with stuff that doesn’t matter to you. Here’s the stuff that does matter.
Generally speaking, you’re in one of 2 states as an athlete
Fight or Flight(sympathetic)
Rest and Digest(parasympathetic)
In competition, during a workout or training session when you’re stressing your body and pushing it to its limits, you’ll be in fight or flight.
But when the lights are off and the game is over, we don’t want you in that state. We want you to tell your body it’s okay to start recovering.
Telling your body it’s time to start recovering can happen in a variety of ways. One of the most basic is breathing. Controlling your breathing and using strategies like shown here can upregulate your vagus nerve to help get your body into a more parasympathetic state. Taking the time to slow down your breath and be mindful after practice will set you up to be ready to go for the next day both physically and mentally.
An additional option to increase parasympathetic tone is spending time with the people you love, whether that be friends or family. Experiencing compassionate touch and words from the people you love will work to decrease respiratory and heart rate.
You do need to make sure you are aware of the music you listen to when trying to recover. Listening to loud music can decrease your recovery by lowering your HRV.
Why is Recovery Important?
As an athlete, you push your body more in a day than most people do in a month. Pushing your body causes stress on your system. If we don’t recover from that stress, it compounds over time and creates bigger problems.
How to Recover Well: The Big Rocks
Developing Proper Sleep Habits
Every athlete hears the importance of sleep and every athlete convinces themselves that it doesn’t apply to them. Let me tell you that you are not the exception. If you think you are performing well now on minimal sleep, you’re holding yourself back from even greater performances.
Developing good sleep hygiene involves a consistent routine that aids in winding you down to prepare to sleep. This routine should avoid blue light by either avoiding screens or using blue-light-blocking glasses. Blue light exposure leads to reduced melatonin release which will make it more difficult to fall asleep. In addition to the blue light, using black-out curtains to keep your room as dark as possible will improve sleep.
The routine should also happen at a consistent time each night. Each hour that the bedtime is before midnight the better.
Caffeine intake should be limited after noon each day. Caffeine’s half-life in the human body is around 5 hours. This means it tasks a substantial amount of time for your body to clear it out. Drinking a Bang at 5 PM before practice will lead to increased difficulty in falling asleep at a reasonable time.
Additional parts of the sleep routine can be more individualized off personal preference. Reading a physical book, journaling in bed, or meditating may help to wind you down and fall asleep quicker.
Meditate to Recover
Meditation is a big word with all sorts of connotations in different people’s heads. When it comes to how it is used for an athlete to recover there’s a simple way to approach it. Just do nothing. Breathe and do nothing.
Don’t worry about what to think about, let thoughts go into your head and go away. Recognize that your thoughts are just that, thoughts. They aren’t good or bad. They just are.
The next time you are stressed or need to unwind after a game go find a quiet room. Sit down in a comfortable position and take deep breaths while letting your mind wander. This will help increase your parasympathetic state and improve your mental health.
How to Eat to Recover
You don’t need some complex or fancy diet to recover. Most athletes need to eat more. Your six-pack doesn’t matter.
Oftentimes going into depth with the macros for an athlete will create unneeded stress. I prefer to just recommend eating a lot of grilled meats. Add vegetables and rice or whole-grain pasta, while avoiding fried foods and most athletes are set. If you feel tired and like you’re not recovering, up your total food intake by adding an extra quarter or half serving of protein and carbs to one or two meals a day.
Also, please avoid excessive alcohol. Celebrating with the boys after a big win is fun, but you’re killing your recovery. The quality of sleep after drinking will be reduced and your performance will drop for the next couple of days. Consider just how long you’re performance will be decreased the next time before you have a drink. Then you can make your decision from there.
Cardiovascular Health’s Role in Recovery
Are you in shape enough to recover? Aiming for a resting heart rate of 60 BPM or lower is a good rule of thumb to make sure you are in good enough shape to recover efficiently.
Your aerobic system aids in helping restore the other energy systems when at rest. This along with the fact that the better shape you are in, the less stress you will incur on gameday. Make it a no-brainer to prioritize your cardiovascular health to improve recovery.
That being said, remember that you are not a cross-country runner. Tempo runs where you go around 50-100 yards at about 60-75% followed by 40 seconds of rest for 10-30 reps a few times a week during your off-season will be enough. Start at the lower end of reps and distance and progressively build up.
The Role of Placebo
Believing in what you’re doing is almost more important than doing the thing itself.
Placebo is the “sugar pill” you heard about in school. A group of people with a common condition take a pill to help with their condition.
Group 1 gets the actual medication, group 2 gets a pill with no medication in it. Yet, people in both groups get better. That’s a placebo at work.
Whatever recovery methods you like, believe in them.
Conclusion
When you push hard, you need to recover harder
Feeling tired? Check that you’re eating both “good” and “enough” food
Stress + Rest = Growth
Failing to recover leads to future issues.
Short term- decreased performance
Long term- illness or injury
Believe in your recovery, placebo effects are real
If you learned something in this one, you’ll love what else we teach in this guide: