In the opener to this series, I said chronic recovery is little more than the the simple stuff we all neglect. You’ll recall this paragraph:
Don’t major in minors. Think about recovery, then you will recover. The most basic, basic, basic things are your 90% in terms of longevity, high-performance, and regular improvement.
Sleep.
Drink water.
Eat real food.
Take naps or meditate.
Relax in pleasant company.
Spend time in nature.
Recovery depends on adequate time allotted, resources being available, and having a safe environment. Sleep and naps buy you time. Food and water provide the resources. Nature and a healthy social circle (aka stress management) facilitate the safe environment.
Sleep Is The Key To All Recovery
Do you go to bed at the same time every night, plus or minus 15 minutes? And do you wake up feeling rested on at least 6 of 7 mornings?
If not, recovery hacks don’t matter.
Acute recovery doesn’t matter.
Immediate recovery doesn’t matter.
You don’t have your life together in a way to support hard training or high-performance.
Once you have those habits in place, fit in another 10-20 minutes of quiet time every day. That can be a power nap, it can be meditation, it can just be a few rounds of deep breathing throughout the day. Consider it your midday reset button.
If you aren’t willing to carve out 10 minutes from your day to care for yourself, there’s no point talking about optimizing your performance – you’ll flame out from nervous exhaustion sooner rather than later anyway.
There are books, podcasts, videos, documentaries, presentations, and research articles about the importance of sleep, the mechanisms of sleep, the neuroscience of sleep, and every other aspect of sleep. Sleep has been so thoroughly studied and so routinely talked about and so convincingly “hacked” that no one seems to take it seriously anymore.
Great sleep happens when you make it happen. You relax, you disconnect from your job, you savor your environment, and you let your brain and body work their magic. Great sleep is a choice. Your entire life affects your ability to fall and stay asleep. Your entire life benefits from you facilitating great sleep.
So read a book or write in a journal or listen to music or meditate…but get away from screens and digital devices. Turn the lights down, then turn them off. Keep your room dark and cool…look, you know what to do for better sleep. If you really don’t, spend an hour researching it, then take action.
But if you’re not committed to your sleep, you aren’t committed to your performance.
(And hey, I’m a parent-athlete. My wife is a parent-athlete. We went through those years with one infant — then the same years with two infants! Babies and toddlers and young children and teenagers will affect your sleep schedule. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But they aren’t an excuse for not having a routine. Children aren’t an excuse for not having a plan. And children aren’t an excuse for not putting down your phone and trying to go to bed. So stuff it.)
Real Food Is Your Source Of Resources
Do you eat foods that grow in the ground, graze in the field, or swim in the sea? How close to their living forms are your daily staples?
If most of your meals come out of a cardboard box or get handed to you through a drive-through window, recovery hacks don’t matter. We don’t need to address your immediate or acute recovery, because you don’t have the resources on board to manage them anyway.
I don’t write for professional athletes. I write for parents and office workers and common citizens who have chosen to pursue sport at increasingly high levels. I write for people with “real lives” in addition to their training.
For those people, there is no decision to be made about fitness vs health. Health comes first. People depend on you. You don’t get to choose the fastest option to performance if it compromises your health. But that’s all okay, because exceptional health supports advanced fitness. You can be very good in your sport and in perfect health. You probably can’t be elite and in perfect health…but once you’re seriously, earnestly, realistically at the threshold of elite, you’re pretty unlikely to still have a “real life” and you can afford some of the compromises!
So if health is the priority, real food is the way to preserve it. Real food is the way to support it. Real food is the way to fuel it.
Your brain and your immune system and all your organs depend on access to nutrients. You get the highest density dosage of nutrients from real food. So eat them and stop making excuses.
I love donuts. I’m not out here denying myself donuts. On Saturday, I walk to the local donut shop with my kids and typically have two donuts.
But let’s call that one “meal” in my week. By that standard of food quantity, I have 28 “meals” in a week. My habits support 24 of those meals being “meat, leaves, and berries” as Mike and Mindy Pockoski have said. The other 4 are a little bit of whatever. Alcohol, desserts, maybe even “cardboard carbs” (a Dan John quote).
The bulk of my meals support my primary goal: exceptional health. Plants and minimally-processed food are the biggest bang for your buck in terms of nutrients…and they happen to be relatively cheap.
Eating on the road can be a challenge, I’m not arguing with you. But eating on the road or eating during competition or eating on an ultra-tight budget or eating with limited time can all serve your goal with a touch of planning. I don’t write about nutrition because it’s such a touchy subject…the point is, get your nutrients from real foods. Without those nutrients, you don’t recover and none of the little stuff matters.
Water Is The Only Beverage You Need – And You Need More Of It
I’m just not getting into it here. Drink water. If you’re a human, you need water. If you’re an athlete, you need more.
After you stumble to the bathroom in the morning, drink a pint of water.
Get out of your office chair for 5 minutes every hour. Either use those 5 minutes to drink a cup of water or use them to pee.
At lunch, drink a pint of water.
After work, drink a pint of water.
With dinner, drink a pint of water.
Right before bed, drink a cup of water.
There’s a time for worrying about electrolyte balance and water cutting and hyperhydration and all those things Gatorade Sport Science Institute specializes in…but that time comes well after you have the habit of drinking enough water.
Bonus: if you’re in an environment to read this article, your water is free. Take advantage and never take that for granted.
Managing Stress Makes A Safe Environment
There’s a saying in bodybuilding: “don’t run if you can walk, don’t walk if you can stand, don’t stand if you can sit, don’t sit if you can lie down.”
There’s a saying Pavel likes to quote: “power loves rest.”
Both quotes allude to recovery, but they really refer to taking it easy. If you’re high-strung, if you’re constantly in motion, if you’re chronically stressed…it’s harder to recover.
Read a Psychology Today article on loneliness or a Science article on anxiety or an Applied Physiology abstract on “stress-induced inflammation response” – the human organism is well-adapted to acute stressors and maladapts to chronic stress.
Time in nature has been shown to reduce biomarkers of stress. Time spent socializing – prolonged, eye-gazing, mirthful conversation with people you trust – has been shown to reduce biomarkers of stress.
And biomarkers of stress have been shown to inhibit anabolic responses, to inhibit myelination of nerves, to impair fine-motor skills, to impair depth perception, and to impede cognitive processing.
In short, constant stress is preventing you from learning from coaching or adapting to training. Not all stress can be prevented — nor should it be, training is stress! — but stress should be managed. Making the conscious choice to sit under a tree for a few minutes, to spend time with friends without an agenda, and to peel apart your identity from your job or your sport or your kids is a choice that serves your health. As in the point about eating real food, serving your health serves your performance.
So make it a daily habit to gaze on the trees, to laugh, and to appreciate who you are outside the gym, outside the office, and outside your family unit.
What Else Helps Recovery?
If these were all you worked on — more and better sleep, more water and better food, less stress — you would probably recover just fine, relative to an amateur athlete’s needs.
Naturally, there’s more when you’re ready to optimize. There’s always more you can do. But it all builds on the skills that enable these habits.
Being diligent about your sleep at night, taking time to rest each day, eating food as nature provides it, always having water, spending time in natural environments, and making time for enjoying life…these are the 90%.
We’re rapidly approaching activities which produce marginal gains. Those gains are worth pursuing, but don’t be proud of moving from 40% to 50% in your recovery game when you could go from 40% to 80% or 90% with less effort.
All that said, let’s talk about acute recovery. Specifically, what to do when you get dealt a bad hand. We’ll talk about the recovery you need after an injury…and distinguishing the unfortunate injuries from the dumb ones.
I’ll leave you with this: honor the basic, basic, basics and you’ll avoid most of the dumb injuries.
That’s the power of good habits and that’s the impact of recovery.
- Jump to [Part 1: A Series For Serious Athletes]
- Jump to [Part 2: It Starts With Your Habits] (you’re here!)
- Jump to [Part 3: Some Injuries Are Dumb, Then There Are Dumb Injuries]
- Jump to [Part 4: Make The Moments Count]
- Jump to [Part 5: It’s All About Your Habits]