Last Friday smash session was awesome! We rode around and 'Chased the sun' in the Makuri islands. Taking on a newly added dynamic route which kept us on our toes and finishing it off with a good climb up the Temple KOM/QOM! It was wonderful to see a lovely group take on the route workout we had planned!
We dove into different methods of recovery and why recovery is good and can help you get stronger. Lets recap some of the good Facts about Recovery and what it means:
Sometimes it can come across that recovery means your lazy or your not going hard enough…
But there’s a way you can incorporate recovery to where it actually benefits your training and it makes you stronger.
Most of the building and restoration happens on recovery days. There’s two different types of recovery days that you can add an addition to your weekly training…
One – active recovery
A ride recovery is where you take a day and spin for 30-60 min max at a very light pace around 30-40% of your ftp focusing on higher cadence and just spinning the legs and not elevating the heart rate
What active recovery does is it enables your blood to flow and get to the muscles to restore whilst not pushing the limit and enameling your body to recover and gain energy for the upcoming workouts.
There are generally two types of active recovery:
Time spent moving between intervals/efforts in a training session
And Easy activities that are performed on days between hard training sessions
Blood Flow distribution during exercise:
Blood vessels will vasodilate allowing for increased blood flow to muscles
After the blood supplies oxygen to the muscles and enters the veins, most of the pressure from the heart is gone. Therefore: the body cannot rely on the heart to send the blood back out of the legs
When performing hard efforts, the contraction of the working muscles squeezes the veins and blood along each section until it makes its way back to the heart.
Muscular contraction ceases and heart rate decreases
No muscular contraction = veins send less blood back to the heart
Result= blood pools in your legs, where there are large amounts of metabolic byproducts
When you cease pedaling (movement) this byproduct remains in your legs and your cardiac out drop drops primarily due to a decrease in heart rate….
which can result in feeling lightheaded since the blood that was heading for your brain is now in your legs!
What should you do? Continue pedaling easily to keep muscular contractions going! The more you can keep the blood moving, the faster your body can clear out byproducts, deliver fuel and oxygen to the muscles, and be ready for the next interval.
Two-other active recovery
We can view active recovery as the days after hard workouts when you can implement “easy spinning.”
This active recovery can help with multiple things...
Keep blood flowing-
Low-intensity exercise will stimulate the blood vessels in working muscles to dilate = increased blood flow, and Feed your muscles.
increased blood flow allows more nutrients into tired and sore muscles
Hard workouts can damage your muscles. Light exercise will increase the blood flow to those muscles while decreasing inflammation.
Light exercise opens up channels in the muscle cells that allow nutrients to enter the cells.
The faster we can get these nutrients back to the muscles, the faster they can repair themselves = sooner you can stress the body again.
Keep in mind: easy means very easy. It is all too common to go at intensities well above what you should
Three- DAY OFF!
Yes these are know as days off... where the biggest gains are made from your training.
Taking one day of the week completely off allows your body to recover from the hard days and restore to come back stronger
Sleep is a huge factor in aiding recovery and restoring after hard workouts and can do loads to helping you feel stronger, get stronger, and take on training with more mental clarity.
Sleep volume and sleep quality are two of the most important aspects of daily recovery
If you are not sleeping enough or sleeping well, then you will be less able to adapt to the training that you perform
There are individual variations in the amount of sleep that different individuals require to perform at their best... so you need to find what works for you best. It always helps to have a device you can use to read your sleep and find the amount of time you need to get full quality sleep for restoration. I have been using an OURA ring for the past year and highly recommend using it to gage your sleep and see trends. It has been a huge game changer for me and my recovery.
Here's a discount code if you want to give it a try!
https://ouraring.com/taf/91bb126c9b
Get 50$) off your order!
Intense training tends to increase the amount of sleep required for adaptation to training
so adding to rest days off, make sure you get to bed and get at least 7-8 hours of sleep to feel ready to rock and roll.
Recovery IS GOOD! so remember, recovery days are days you also get stronger. You can mentally bounce back ready to go for a hard ride too.
What are some ways you recover and relax from hard training?
As always, wonderful to see you and we hit up a longer climb with a good long warm up this coming week! hope to see you there!
Be Kind, Do Fearless!
Great reminder that a rest day is super duper beneficial. Awesome ride Friday. Always a Growing opportunity. I So appreciate you taking the time to pick a route and create a workout.