Simple Tips to aid in recovery and prevent injury for High School, College, Or recreational AThletes
Treat your recovery as you would your training sessions - Shift your mindset to approach your recovery with the same focus and drive that you do in your training. Recovery is not just rest (although that is a major part of it), it is doing a proper cooldown, nutrition, proper sleep hygiene, stress management and breathing techniques, and recovery modalities such as sauna, cryotherapy, red light, etc. An athlete pushing to be their best doesn’t typically want to take a “rest day”. We see jokes and memes about “rest days” all the time. It’s almost a cardinal sin to take a day off – you’ll fall behind, you won’t want it enough, you’re lazy, and the list goes on. But a recovery day, well this is absolutely necessary for achieving peak performance. This doesn’t mean you have to do nothing and just rest, you can do some mobility work to address lacking ranges of motion, you can train your parasympathetic nervous system (the rest and digest system) with breathwork, yoga, or foam rolling, you can go for a light run, you can hit the sauna or ice bath, you can do technique drills for your lifts or your sport. There are plenty of things you can do that will enhance your performance while also allowing the systems of your body to properly recover, rebuild, and adapt to the demand and load from your more strenuous training sessions. After all, it’s not while you are training that you are getting faster and stronger, it is afterward that you reap all the benefits. It is while you are recovering that your body adapts to the stimulus introduced via your training. “Overtraining” can often actually be attributed to “under recovering”.
Remember to take time to de-load - This goes hand in hand with the recovery discussion. Taking a week to pull back on our training load can be a very tough task. Again, as athletes and competitors, we are constantly pushing and striving to be our best and often don’t want to stop until we’re forced to due to overtraining (“under recovering”) or worse - injury. Programming a de-load week is important and necessary for a number of reasons. First, no human is capable of continual linear progress in strength. What does this mean? It means it is physiologically impossible to continue improving past a certain point without decreasing the load of your training, and then rebuilding back up. Most of us are probably familiar with the term “beginner gains”. What this means is that when you begin strength training or a new physical endeavor, you can progress quickly, but this doesn’t continue forever. There will be a point at which these “beginner gains” hit a limit. This is where we must take a calculated decrease in training load if we ever wish to surpass this level. This cycle must be repeated over and over again in order for our bodies to adapt and progress appropriately. Secondly, our muscles recover more quickly than other tissues and systems of our bodies. Our connective tissues/tendons, central nervous system, and endocrine system take longer to recover. Why is this important? Suppose our tendons and connective tissues are recovering slower than our muscles. In that case, they will start to break down and become susceptible to pain and injury if we keep pushing at the pace we feel our muscles can tolerate. Our nervous system is what creates the impulses that tell our muscles to contract – if this is depleted, they cannot signal the muscles to generate as much force and our performance suffers. It also leaves us feeling fatigued physically and mentally and impairs our focus, coordination, and reaction time. The endocrine system governs our hormones. If this system isn’t able to recover it harms our body’s ability to function and recover. Taking some time to de-load may feel like you aren’t doing much in your training sessions because the muscles may be capable of doing more work, but we must allow these other systems and tissues the time they need to fully recover. The benefits of de-loading are twofold. First, it allows proper recovery so we can continue to progress our performance more steadily and consistently over the long run without hitting as many plateaus. Second, it decreases our risk of injury. Depending on the intensity of your training, the demands of your sport, and where you are in season will determine your ability to de-load.
Utilize your team - Every elite or professional athlete has a team around them. Coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, trainers, and a variety of therapists. Now I’m not saying you need to go out and find all these – that is costly and time-consuming. But utilize what is available to you depending on where you are. Take advantage of any opportunity you can. If you are at a college with more amenities and performance professionals – use them. If you are in high school or just starting into weight training or a new sport, find some guidance. It can be working with a personal trainer, even if just for a few sessions to gain some knowledge and confidence about how to train properly. Find a sports medicine practitioner, therapist, or trainer that offers functional assessments. This can be a good option to find gaps in your movement patterns or function that may result in decreased performance or increased susceptibility to an injury. It can reveal subtle limitations that may be holding you back from reaching your true athletic potential. Furthermore, exposing and addressing your weak links early can potentially avoid injury, frustration, and heartache in the future, whether that be a preventable injury that pops up in the playoffs or pains that appear long after you hang up your cleats from years of abuse.