The Only Recovery Guide For Triathlon & Sport You Will Ever Need
As IRONMAN coach Matt Dixon has earned the label of the ‘Recovery Coach,’ it seems only fitting that Purple Patch and it’s coaching staff would build a one-stop shop for everything recovery for sport and triathlon. The topic of recovery has grown in importance as sport science and the sport of triathlon has evolved. With this evolution comes new tactics, equipment, and routines to help athletes recover quickly from intense training or races. Even with all of the new recovery techniques, many original principles still hold true. This recovery guide is all you will ever need as an athlete or triathlete to help you recover quickly, and prepare you for upcoming efforts.
Our guide will cover three areas (plus a bonus training resource):
Importance of Recovery for High Performance
Recovery as a Pillar of Performance
Coaches have long understood that the adaptations from training take place during rest. However, as we have coached athletes and observed others for years, recovery is often relegated to an afterthought. It needs to be at the forefront of the minds of coaches and athletes. As we at Purple Patch often say, performance arrives out of a smart and effective training plan, but it doesn't matter how good that training plan is if it is not supported with proper nutrition and fueling, and integrated recovery. We encourage our coached athletes to view recovery as an integral component of their plan. For this reason, Purple Patch philosophically values recovery equally to actual endurance training. This doesn’t mean being as lazy as possible, but rather to ensure you integrate enough recovery to allow you to train hard and optimize results. Recovery is not a short-cut or a magic elixir. The route to getting faster is not any easier because your training includes recovery. Recovery is what keeps you healthy and training consistently, and over time, allows the big gains to occur.
Be An Active Participant
We can’t recover for you. We also can’t tell you what works best for you. For those reasons, we always educate all our athletes on the principles and strategies behind our programs so they understand why they are doing the things we ask. This goes a long ways to getting athletes to follow-through. Then, we must recognize that every athlete responds to training and life stresses differently. Every athlete has different life circumstances and constraints. There are common principles and strategies that ring true across the board, but the specific tactics and doses for certain activities that each athlete applies for optimal results will vary. We want to arm you with as many tools and tactics as possible to help you optimize your chances of success. Furthermore, one schedule does not fit all, and Purple Patch encourages you to think and become an active participant in your training program. We don't expect you to do this alone. We'll be right there with you every step of the way with support, guidance, and education. But, I urge you to become an active participant, learn about yourself as an athlete, embrace the education process, and take an intelligent approach to training. You will truly evolve.
Integration Is Key
The various components of performance in triathlon or endurance sports, as outlined in the Purple Patch Pillars of Performance, are not mutually exclusive. The reason we have four Pillars is that they all play a critical role in your success as an endurance athlete. [Tim: DELETED PARAGRAPH] You will need to succeed across all four Pillars -- Endurance, Strength, Nutrition & Fueling, and Recovery -- consistently to reach your optimal performance potential. Yes, recovery too. We will do our best to remind you of the overall context and big picture, but as you engage with the educational material, remember to take a step back, place it in the overall big-picture view of what you want out of the sport, and how the topic being discussed can help you achieve optimal performance.
Why Recovery
Training is a hard, it will impact your immune system, hormonal balance, metabolic state, not to mention the more obvious strain on muscle and other tissues. Before we dig into the specific methods of recovery, it is important you understand why it’s important to integrate recovery into your training program. Properly employed recovery sessions and tools will help accomplish the following:
Restore the Immune System & Hormonal Balance: Our immune system becomes suppressed during training blocks (or weeks), and it takes time to fully restore and rejuvenate our immune system. This is one reason athletes often succumb to frequent sickness if they under-recover. Restoring the immune system occurs within sleep, daily rest, and low-intensity training sessions.
Replenish Your Caloric Deficit, Hydrate, & Consume Electrolytes: If you have a heavy training load this can be a challenge. A few lighter sessions or days will provide the opportunity to restock these essential components of performance and health. This is one reason why we don't suggest restricting calories on lighter days.
Repair Muscle Damage: Training can create significant muscular damage, which can take time to heal. Recovery sessions, sleep, and rest facilitate muscle fiber repair.
Maintain Emotional Balance: A more subjective, but critical component, is the pursuit of emotional balance and motivation. The old saying that 'fatigue makes cowards of us all' is very true. It is hard to put forth your best effort when you are truly fatigued.
Enable Consistency: This may only be a summary of what the above items unlock, but it's worth discussing. If there is a magic bullet in endurance sports, it is the ability to train consistently over many, many, weeks, months, and even years to evolve to your optimal level of performance. You cannot achieve this level of consistency without properly integrated recovery.
Physiological Adaptations: Underpinning all of this is the fact that physiological adaptations (improvements) happen during recovery. It's critical to have an approach that integrates training AND recovery into the program to optimize the performance gains you can make. If you are always emotionally spent, constantly fatigued, or consistently fighting illness, it's unlikely you'll be making much progress, let alone enjoying the work. This will eventually compound and you won't have the mental, emotional, or physical capacity to train hard. Very quickly, you'll stop enjoying the sport, and why would you continue if you were in this state? It requires a lot of hard work to reach your goals; therefore, the mission is to integrate enough recovery to support the 'whole system.'
There is no getting around the fact that high performance requires hard work over many weeks, months, and years to achieve your dreams. In order to execute, you need a balanced training program that allows you to stay healthy, injury-free, and consistently doing training specific to your needs. Integrated recovery will allow you to stay on the journey to optimize your performance and enjoy the process along the way.
Types of Recovery for the Performance Enthusiast
Global & Lifestyle Recovery
You can think of global recovery as getting back to overall physiological wellness in addition to recovery from daily life. This is the foundation of an effective recovery approach. In general, doing more to improve your global recovery will have the biggest benefit in realizing the gains from your training. Here are a few of the global recovery strategies:
Sleep: Quite simply, the most important and critical piece of recovery there is. Yes, above all else. Sleep is where the majority of recovery occurs. We need sleep in terms of both quality and quantity, yet, along with under-fueling, this is the most ignored factor in performance for most endurance athletes. A good rule of thumb is to aim for at least 6-7 hours of sleep during training phases. Ideally, to ensure 2 complete REM cycles, you should aim for 8+ hours per night. If you value recovery as an integrated part of training, and if you recognize sleep as the most critical part of recovery, then you cannot continually or chronically minimize sleep in pursuit of training. For some athletes, they will need to get up earlier than they'd like, but sleeping 3, 4 or 5 hours a night to provide enough time to cram everything in is not a sustainable practice. If you consistently (always) minimize sleep, you simply cannot get the returns and gains on your training in the long term. It may work for short bursts, but long-term negative effects will occur.
Sleep Optimization Tip: If you suffer from low sleep, try to optimize 2 or 3 times a week where you can sleep an additional 1-2 hour(s) or up to 8 or 9 hours a night. Try to get as much of the most restorative phase of life that you can. Once you get into this routine, you will feel the difference.
Power Naps & Meditation: If you are so lucky eh? We understand naps may be a bit of a challenge to fit in, but there are big benefits when you get it right. It's important to recognize that deep sleep is not needed, but rest and relaxation are. We are talking about power naps or catnaps (short breaks of 10 - 25 minutes) where you can calm down, relax, close your eyes, maybe, even doze off. The key is to avoid entering a normal sleep cycle, which will leave you with that terrible groggy feeling. Brief naps, even those as short as 6-10 minutes, can restore wakefulness, promote alertness, and improve retention. If you are unable to doze off, you might try to meditate instead of taking a nap, which can provide similar benefits. In general, we don't suggest long naps (60+ minutes) as they can disrupt evening sleep patterns, which should be a priority.
Nap Tip: If you feel groggy after your naps, it's a sign you are napping too long. Try shortening them and see how you feel. Remember, sleep is not needed, but rest and relaxation are.
With this all in mind, let’s look at your key habits in nutrition to optimize recovery.
Post-workout Fueling: It all begins with this critical recovery habit. It is ‘everything,’ and I would label one of my top two habits when discussing the broad topic of recovery. Your mission is to consume calories within 30 minutes of a training session. There are layered reasons for this, but they include:
Protein naturally suppressed the elevated stress hormones associated with hard training. It also stabilizes energy for the rest of your day.
Protein facilitates tissue repair and adaptations.
Carbohydrate refueling optimizes readiness for subsequent training.
Carbohydrate provides fuel for your brain for the rest of your day's activities -- optimizing focus and decision making.
Consumption of calories prevents ‘athletic starvation’ from caloric deficit, tending to lead to more control on eating choices in the rest of the day's meals. Folks feel better, eat better, and have control when post workout fueling becomes a habit.
High Quality Meals: Outside of post workout fueling, a focus on nutrient rich foods that can provide the building blocks, oils, and vitamins and minerals needed in a healthy diet are a key component to health and recovery. A few aspects to consider are:
Plenty of protein. Athletes and people with higher stress lives benefit from a real focus on protein-centric diets. Emerging research highlights the amplified benefits of high protein for endurance athletes.
Eat your fruits and veggies. Training depletes the body, and every athlete has a serious task of emphasizing a diet rich in a broad range of vitamins and minerals. Every meal should include plenty of vegetables, and ensure you add fruit multiple times daily. It provides a platform of health to optimize recovery and maximize training success
Don’t be scared of fat. Your body requires plenty of good oils and fats, supporting your cellular function, immune system, and much more. Avocados, olive oils, and fish oils are good examples of foods to embrace, and avoid counting calories on.
Hydration: The forgotten weapon in your health profile and recovery is hydration. Athletes tend to do a good job in hydration throughout training, but too many then live their life like a shriveled prune. Consuming at least 1 ounce of water for each pound of body weight, outside of training, on a daily basis, will be beneficial. Make it a habit and optimize:
Cellular function
Tissue health
Recovery from training
Alertness and daily energy
Immune system
And much more
If you get these three elements right, consistently, then your eating habits become a central part of your recovery process.
Sports-specific Recovery
Sport-specific recovery practices are something that you will apply to your training life as an athlete and may be integrated as a part of your specific training plan. Training recovery is not simply 'rest days' from activity, but can include lighter activity that is designed to facilitate blood flow around the body without stresses to your metabolic health. The focus of sport-specific recovery comes down to how you build your training week, your training plan, and training season. We encourage you to recognize how these recovery areas have been integrated into your plan and how you can use them to consistently train hard for many months in a row.
Athlete Misconception: ‘Recovery Means Do Nothing’
Occasional complete rest may be part of the overall approach, but more often than not, your recovery sessions will include some activity that induces blood flow.
Sports-specific recovery activities include:
Proper Fueling: It is important to know that nailing your fueling window gives you a head start in helping the body recover from the metabolic and hormonal stresses of training. Please refer to Nailing Your Nutrition & Hydration Strategies for more depth here.
Light Activity: This means lighter intensity and shorter duration training sessions. The goal of these sessions is not to build fitness, power, speed, or endurance. Instead, they 'move blood' around the body to enable recovery processes to occur and maximize rejuvenation. A general rule of thumb would be to keep these sessions under 1 hour and closer to 40 minutes. Interestingly, these sessions maintain neuromuscular firing and prevent athletes from feeling 'flat' or tired.
Note: The pace of these sessions should be conversational. That is, you should have no problems carrying on a conversation at any point during the session.
Common Training Mistake
Going too hard during recovery sessions, or trying to turn it into a 'quality' training session. Hard work will come in your plan, but we want to make sure you are ready to give those hard efforts when they are called for. If you have accumulated too much fatigue you won't be able to give what is needed. Have confidence in your training plan, and enjoy your recovery sessions when you can.
Complete Rest Days: Sometimes complete rest is needed to take a day or two away from the sport, even if only for a mental or emotional break. Avoid filling these rest days with other duties or crazy stressful activities because you want to make your day away from the sport as restorative as possible. One negative aspect of a complete rest day is that athletes often feel very flat with heavy legs the day following a complete rest, which can negatively impact your performance.
Rest Day Tip: Avoid taking a complete rest day prior to a key session as we want to maximize our performance during these key sessions. If you do, then ensure you complete an extensive ramping warm up to maximize the opportunity to perform well in your key session.
Recovery Blocks: Recovery blocks are programmed blocks of consecutive days of rest or lighter activity to allow restoration and rejuvenation following a build-up of higher effort days, and is probably what is most commonly referred to when folks say recovery. The traditional recovery block is 1 week out of every 4, so 3 weeks of building efforts, followed by 1 week of lighter work. Through our coaches' experiences, we have found 3 weeks of continuous building efforts tends to accumulate too much fatigue over the long term, and doesn't enable the consistency we are looking for. At Purple Patch, we practice 10-14 days of building efforts followed by 2-5 days of lighter activity. Our recovery blocks are more frequent but of shorter duration, and we’ve found they are more effective in reaching our goal of long-term consistency and health.
Note: There is no single ratio of building work to lighter work that will be appropriate for all athletes. Every athlete is different, some are more resilient and can handle more work with less recovery, other athletes may need additional recovery. This does not make one athlete superior to another, it only means a different recovery recipe is required for optimal performances.
Extended Breaks: Taking a birds-eye view of your journey as an endurance athlete, particularly for those who train year-round, we strongly recommend once or twice a year taking 10 days to 3 weeks away from structured training. While you can remain active, avoid structured training. The goal is rejuvenation. Be your own guide to find what is right for you. We want you to resume training refreshed and motivated. If you have a multi-year vision for the athlete you want to become, this is a critical component to enable consistency season after season.
Tip: Avoiding Burn-out
It's rare to see an athlete who excludes extended breaks succeed season after season. At some point in subsequent seasons after the skipped breaks, performances tend to suffer, and in the worst case the athlete completely burns-out or suffers chronic injuries, leading them to move away from the sport entirely.
Taking A Seasonal Approach: This is the whole different proportion of activity during different times of the year. For most athletes, this would be using the post-season or early-season months to increase the load of swimming relative to the other sports, reducing running and cycling. Running is a sport with much higher stress on the musculoskeletal system than biking or swimming, so being swim heavy in the post and pre-seasons allows for some of the tissues that absorb the most strain with running to recover. This is only a general rule of thumb. If there is a specific weakness in your swim, bike, or run, then the post-season and pre-season are ideal times to improve as an athlete and focus on improving your weaknesses. The off-season is also a great time to 'cross-train,' where a cyclist might mountain bike or do cyclocross in the fall and winter, or runners may snowshoe or cross-country ski.
Recovery Techniques & Tools
This is a very popular area for recovery due to all the gadgets and tools on the market. We like to frame recovery techniques and tools as supplemental and an add-on to Global and Training Recovery, providing benefit in facilitating recovery, particularly from acute sessions. Although they may be of lesser importance, they are certainly worthy of mention and consideration as a component of your recovery program.
Compression: While compression clothing doesn't have much validation for performance within training, they do have a fairly accepted positive influence on recovery following, and these include tights, calf guards, etc. I would recommend their use in air travel and following tough workouts.
Heat: For most situations, we prefer heat over ice for recovery. The literature on ice for recovery is inconclusive, and we are not a fan of the resulting tightness of joints that occurs because of it. However, if you have an injury, ice is an accepted treatment for an acute injury. We are not recommending it as an aid for recovery. An old coaching adage is ‘don't mess with inflammation too much.’
Trigger Point & Foam Roller: Foam rollers and trigger point treatments can be very effective, albeit occasionally painful. They are very effective at relieving the insertion points of muscles, allowing the main body of the muscle to release. We have a quick 10-minute foam roller protocol you can follow. Please click here if you have not seen it.
Static Stretching: In general, we do not advocate too much static stretching. There is limited evidence that it helps endurance athletes perform better or improves recovery. So the classic, touch your toes and hold it for 30-60 seconds, with the occasional bounce, should go in the rubbish bin. At Purple Patch we are strongly in favor of mobility exercises. If you are preparing to exercise, we much prefer a dynamic warm up, which takes your body through a series of joint mobility exercises that will loosen the joints and help prepare the muscles to work. After you workout, it's the same advice. I much prefer a cool-down, where you continue with motion and movement of your activity, but bring the intensity way down, as a way to help transition the body out of work-mode.
Warm Up & Cool Down Tip
There can be a fair amount of muscle damage during exercises, so I don't encourage static stretching, which can cause micro-tears on top of already fatigued or damaged muscles.
How to Manage Recovery in Your Performance Life:
Consequences Of Inadequate Recovery
We have a saying that we like to use when considering recovery, which is ‘make sure you get in front of massive fatigue.’ Remember that performance arrives out of a long journey of consistent training, not any single session or week of training. When you simply train and train, without adequate easy sessions, or train consistently but ignore the value of nutrition and sleep, negative outcomes are sure to occur. Here are just a few:
Performance Decline: You will start to lose power, pace, and speed across all intensities. Training begins to feel like more of a chore. Unfortunately, poor performance normally elicits the reaction of the need to train harder, starting the cycle of failure.
Disruption Of Energy Balance: When under-recovered, the system becomes greatly over-stressed. Several things can occur as a result of this, but common factors might be disruption of circadian rhythm, leading to sleepless nights and fatigue in the day, and disruption of optimal hormonal function.
Retention of Fat or Loss of Weight: When the system becomes over-stressed, normally in conjunction with poor fueling, the body will have a harder time maintaining normal composition. Some people lose large amounts of body weight, mostly muscle loss, while more commonly, you may experience retention of body fat.
Frequent Sickness & Increased Risk of Injury: As mentioned earlier, recovery will support and rejuvenate your immune system, but if you fail to recover, you get sick more often. Not only that, you have an impaired ability to get healthy from the sickness. Guess what, more lost training time. Starting to get it yet? Get in front of fatigue to ensure that you recover effectively, and allow you to maintain a consistent and steady long term dose of hard and effective training.
Summaries & Takeaways
If you simply aim to follow everything your training plan throws at you with no reflection on how you are adapting, following a blind 'more is better' approach, you are more susceptible to fatigue, injury, and failure. Your task should be to find what is optimal for you and your unique situation. Here are a few more tips which may help you better execute on integrating proper recovery into your life.
Know Yourself
Recovery is the most important area for you to stay in tune with yourself. Only you know how you truly feel, and if you have gone too deep, too frequently, and have accumulated too much fatigue to hit your training goals. Or conversely, if you are holding back and are not really hitting the mark on the hard sessions. As you have learned today, proper recovery should help on both fronts.
Know the Intent of the Plan
Ensure you understand the goals of the training phase and training week and use your training plan to connect with the focus of each training session. Then, work to consistently hit the goals of each workout. Make sure you keep your light days light. Buy into the big picture.
Utilize Your Weekly Schedule
We don't want you to blindly follow every possible option we publish with a 'more is better' mindset. With your freshly acquired or renewed knowledge of recovery, you should understand the purpose, goals, and techniques of integrating proper recovery into your work. Then, use your life constraints along with your training plan to find a weekly schedule that you can consistently follow. You can move sessions around to fit your life. Experiment with some different templates to find an optimal schedule or at least spend some time to reflect on how your recent training week schedule has been.
How did you feel?
Did you have enough recovery when training was integrated into the stresses of your daily life?
Key Foundational Sessions
At Purple Patch, as a Squad Athlete, your training plan is structured around these sessions. These should be the cornerstones of your training week and are the priority. It is worth reinforcing that many athletes might only be completing the key foundational sessions, yet others might be able to add the full complement of recommended and optional workouts. This is highly personal and is reflective of goals, racing, and training experience, and your individual life demands. It is not indicative of how much you can or will improve.
Finally, Remember That Recovery Is Not a Short-Cut
Make no mistake about it, training for endurance sports is challenging and requires plenty of dedication, motivation, and commitment. Our goal of stressing recovery is to equip you with the tools and information required to make smart training decisions. We want to optimize your training load, while maintaining positive adaptations over the long term. For you, the goal is to maximize training within both your physical abilities, as well as the overall stress accumulation of other activities. If you employ a long term view to integrating recovery into training and realize that it is a tool to help you train harder and more consistently, you quickly realize it is a road to your optimal performance.
Free Download: Purple Patch Recovery Scorecard
Take your recovery seriously by taking the next step. Use the Purple Patch Recovery Scorecard in order to train like a champ, track your recovery progress, and make your next session even better.