Why 'Recovery' Is Our Secret Weapon To Train Harder

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo coaching, Jared Donnelly. So we know that training adaptation doesn't actually occur in the training session itself, but instead in your recovery from the session. That's why you couldn't just do a hard session and every single day and expect to improve. Your body needs time to recover and adapt in order to get the best training benefits. But so much emphasis is placed on the training sessions themselves. But what about how to do recovery? Well, what do you need to focus on when it's time to recover? How would you like to make sure you're giving your body the best chance at optimal recovery and maximum growth from training? We'll be talking all about recovery in this episode, but first our starting segments is what are you grateful for, dad? Welcome to the episode. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jordan. Looking forward to recovering hard in this episode, as they say. Always laughed at that sentence. It's an old football analogy. Come on, Come on, guys. Big day today. Now we need to recover hard.

Yeah. Post game, if you get the win in the club rooms, just always hear the coach saying, recover hard tonight.

I always thought that that was a message of them to go out and get blind drunk, get on the beers.

As Dan Andrews would say. Yes.

My gratitude is a. It's. Look, it's a. It's a little bit of a weird one, but I, I just love seeing improvement, seeing people do pbs. And I'm so grateful that we've got such a good little community in Trivalo coaching where everybody's on the same page and just trying to be a better version of themselves today than they were yesterday. And a little message and there back to me saying, you know, another, another improvement. Thank you. The program's working. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for the satisfaction I get from seeing people improve. But I'm more grateful that people, you know, spend 10 seconds just messaging me saying, you know, how good it makes them feel to continue to improve, you know, over the journey.

The small little wins are so fun, aren't they, where you, you know, you train hard for block, you get a little win, you get a little improvement. Just keeps you going. And when you push hard the next block and you just. It's a const. A game of improvement, but it's really fun.

Yeah. On that topic, it's like people often ask me, how far do you reckon I can go? You know, as a runner, what, what pace do you reckon I can run for the 10k as a rider, what power do you reckon I can get? Can I get to 200 watts? Can I get to 250? Can I get to 300? And you know, there's no ceiling. I don't reckon. And I've seen many examples of people who I would never have thought could have achieved what they are, but they have. And that's because I don't put limits on anybody. And, and the answer is always, you know, your limit is yourself. What are you prepared to do to get to those goals?

Yeah, my gratitude. Nothing to do with athletes, just I'm grateful for streaming services. You know, there are half a dozen streaming services out at the moment. There's Netflix, Stan Binge Disney, there's a whole wide range. And I think most people are in a position where they have friends or family members who have signed up to at least one of them and just the ability to select any streaming service and choose any show that you want at your disposal, any movie, any show, any documentary at your fingertips. It's actually really great to have so very simple entertainment. Gratitude for me.

Fantastic.

Next segment is what has caught your attention recently, dad, we had the Sunny Coast 70.3 on the weekend. What caught your attention there?

I just got reminded from the results just of our small group of athletes who managed to be in the Sunshine coast to do the event because the majority of Australia was banned from, from going to the event. So it was a bit of a unique race where, you know, really it was just the Queenslanders who were able to get there and maybe some South Australians and Tasmanians. So what, what stood out and caught my attention was a constant reminder of how important not only is your preparation, but your pre race plan and then the execution. So you can't have one without the other, without all three. Obviously you have to prepare well, you have to have a good plan for the race day and then you have to execute and, and it was amazing. For the very first time, we had almost every one of our athletes end up with a PB and it came down, what was the difference? It came down to them understanding the execution better and understanding their plan had to be really accurate and, and it had to be flexible as well. Cause the conditions can vary on, you know, for any given weekend race, you know, time slot in the year. So it just blew my mind how important the execution part of the whole journey is and we just bang on about that so much.

It's funny that we bang on about it so much and it still blows your mind because it is true. It's just you see countless example after example and there's a reason that our motto is plan, prepare, perform.

Yeah. And so it was really good to actually get 100% of the athletes who competed, you know, improve and execute really well and in some cases say, you know, I could have actually gone a bit harder, which is a really good sentence to say instead of, you know, I was, I was creeping.

If you asked the I don't know how many there were actually in the week and I didn't check the total, it might have been a bit less than normal 500 athletes or something. How many of them felt like they had more in the tank at the end? I'd be surprised if there was more than 3. 4.

It's interesting when I go and look at all the results and in the age group categories and I just love looking at. Because the Ironman results category has your average pace for your run in the results which without you having to look it up. So you can just click on female 50 to 55 and you can see what the average run pace for the first 30, 40. Every. Every athlete you just. And as you go through you can see some athletes finish middle in the, in the pack of their age group. Some athletes finish the front end, some athletes finish at the back end. And, and there's a shift with the run pace in the. From the middle to the back end where it just, you know, there are some people who are doing 7 minute K pace who are finishing in the middle of the pack and yet there's some people at the end of the race who are doing 610 pace yet they're at the end of the pack and they've probably had a better day than the middle of the pack. Person who's done a. You know, and that's what's kind of important to me is, you know, how are you finishing that middle pack? Person who's doing a 7 minute K pace is clearly walking for some percentage of that race. And, and they would probably. Even though they might have come 33rd and the person who did a 6:10 pace came 55th. That person who came 55th has had a better day.

Yeah.

Um, and that's what I'm sort of saying.

Yeah, absolutely. Once again, our motto is plan, prepare, perform. And the performance part is just so much of the, of the result compared to probably what people realize. They probably think that most of it is the training but the performance on the days is everything. What caught my attention is watching the last couple of Diamond League races which is the athletics. The highest athletic league races in the world. If you don't know what they are, it's basically there's currently my 12 meets throughout the year where the best athletes go and compete against each other. Um, and then it's a great, it's a great way for the top athletes to get world class competition. Um, and especially in Olympic. Yeah it's used as a great lead up to the Olympics. But funnily enough this year there was two races post Olympics and it was amazing to see so many, you know, superhuman athletes who just produced unbelievable results at Tokyo Olympics perform so poorly at these follow up Diamond League races and how clear it is that you just cannot hold form. You know they, and that obviously shows that they did a good job that they peaked perfectly for Tokyo and they couldn't hold it any longer. So you know some of the amazing performances we saw at the Olympics. Cast of Orholm, the Norwegian Viking who ran one of the greatest hurdle races you'll ever see. Dalala Muhammad, the American who also ran an unbelievable race to come second. Peter bowl, the Aussie who ran a gun 1500 meter event to, to the final and come fourth. A lot of these athletes race these post diamond leagues and just race so slowly. A lot of the 1500 meter girls, the 1500 meter was on fire at the Olympics and the same girls that were basically in the final all ran, they all ran sub four minutes in the Tokyo final. 356, 357. And then in the Diamond League race ran 404, you know 403 to 405. And to me it was just so obvious that some athletes peaked when it counted. There were some athletes that competed at Tokyo and didn't do so well and then in these Diamond League races performed quite well. So they obviously didn't peak properly.

Swain was one of those, wasn't he? He ran well at the Olympics but he actually dominated the Diamond League two weeks later.

Yeah, yeah. He just managed to hold form the entire time. I think he probably could have performed a little bit better at the back end of Tokyo if we were being critical. The high jumpers weren't jumping as high, the pole vaulters weren't jumping as high. Yeah, to me it was just a really clear example of how hard it is to hold form and that even these top athletes who you think when you're watching them, you just think they're World class. You think that they're aliens for how good they are. But you see them at their prime in the Olympics and you don't see the rest of the year where they have these low periods. And that's really important to remember.

Yeah, it's a really good point. And you can talk about that and I do mention that a lot when I, you know I always use Peter Sagan as an example for cycling where you know he's. His main thing is used to be the couple of one day classics in March and April. Then he'd have a training period for the Tour de France in July. And you would absolutely see him riding very average in January, February and come really good in a particular two or three week period during the Classics. You know, Paris Roubaix and Flanders and Flesh Malone and Amstel Gold, whatever those races are. And then you wouldn't hear much of him and he would be racing here and there, but not winning anything. And then all of a sudden he gets to the Tour and he wins stages and it's just all about managing your training for the right peak. And there's example example after each example showing that exact story across all types of sports. And it is such a thing hard thing to get correct is to taper correctly and peak for the right period. And oftentimes it's not one particular day. You need to be peaking for a period of time in cycling. It, you know, you want to be ready for the spring Classics in, in spring and then in you want to be ready for a Grand Tour in July, May, June, July, August, whichever one you choose, the Giro Tour and the Welter. So it's not the easiest thing. And one, one fit doesn't suit everybody. Everybody's individual with how they. It's a matter of finding what suits you better through trial and error.

Basically it's. It was good to see some athletes just pull the pin completely and just go I'm not performing well, I'm done. And they, they just pulled out of the Diamond League and the last, the Diamond League final was on, on the weekend and or the end of last week. And that's. It's quite a big event on the calendar for these athletics athletes because the winner's prize purse is $30,000 and second gets $20,000. For a lot of athletes. You know it a big part of income potential income for their yearly salary that even down to eighth place gets $8,000 or something. So you perform well and you show up and compete you getting some decent income. But athletes just pulling the pin saying I just can't do it. And they're having to make that tough choice, but might be the correct one if they're just pushing their body too much.

It raises another point too, doesn't it Joel, where you're getting points each diamond league event over 10 to 12 events and it's the one with the most points at the end of the season who wins the first prize, second prize, third prize, etc. So they're really rewarding consistency and not the person who's, who's going to peak on one particular period. So it's a bit of a dilemma, isn't it, for the athletes who are trying to forge a career as a world class athlete or manage to live as a. As a professional. Yeah, it's a tough one.

Yeah, definitely. You'll have to correct me if I'm wrong. I think that this year, I think that it was a grand final day last week. So I think whoever won on that day one, but I'm not 100 certain on that. I did see a lot of the winners on that day. Maybe they just coincidentally had the most points for the year, but I don't think so. I think they really. They were all holding up the Diamond League trophy, so.

Right. Oh no, I think that'd be a bit sad if that was the case. Yeah.

Yeah. Especially after. Maybe they did. Maybe they did that because the lead up to the Tokyo Games was so different for each athlete. You know, they can't ask athletes to consistently show up to Diamond League events because there was four in the last six weeks up to Tokyo. And maybe that doesn't work with a specific athlete. So they get punished by not showing up to Diamond League. Maybe that's why they did that this year.

Yeah, we can find that one out.

Yeah. Anyway, let's get into today's topic. We want to talk all about recovery and we just want to start by talking about recovery as a whole. And I want to start from a different angle of recovery and that's the psychological aspect of recovery. Because as much as it's required physically to actually help you improve as an athlete, there is a huge psychological aspect which has to be talked about. Yeah.

And one that a lot of people don't consider really. I use that on myself a lot because I know in the hard training block I can just push myself a little bit more towards the end of the block on the say we're doing two weeks of really solid training and I know that on the Sunday or the Saturday, Sunday, the last weekend I'VE just got to get through this and in my mind I've got recovery. I know that I'm going to have some easy days so I can go for it in the last couple of days. Whereas if I'm in the middle week of that block, I'm sort of still protecting myself to finish the second week of the hard block. So definitely whether that's real or whether it's just in my mind I'm definitely able to push like you are at the last 200 meters of an 800 meter event or you know, the last 5K of a marathon. You seem to be able to find something just to finish off knowing that it's going to be over in a minute and then you're going to get a period of recovery and rest and you can, you know, get fresh again and then start, start your next period of, of training. So psychologically there's, there's definitely some contribution in, in, in that aspect of thinking about recovery.

Yeah, I think I, I was talking to you on Sunday night about yeah, making it to the end of your training block and my last sub threshold session was on Sunday. And I just explained to you that by the time I'd finished the main efforts and got to the cool down, you know, I absolutely crawled home on my bike. And in that crawl home I was just thinking I've, I've just made it, you know, I've just got to get home here and then that's the end of the block. And um, sometimes you just have that, that much fatigue built up that you really are just, just getting to that end, knowing that you've got a recovery week, a deload week ahead. Um, it's really a mental game just to get to that point and then you can get through. So I mean, let's just start broadly. So what happens if you don't recover? Basically two main problems. We'd say you risk plateauing and you risk injury. Right?

Yeah. You also risk a third thing which is going worse and I think that's just as bad as plateauing really. Not quite. Probably that is the result of definitely being too motivated in most cases. And let's face it, we have some athletes who need encouraging. We have some athletes who are totally self motivated and I'm trying to hold them back. So you've got an extreme approach to a training period and you know, it is amazing how, how easy it is for people just to keep pushing when they're motivated and, and without having someone to say, hang on a minute, you know, you need to Actually have, have some rest and recovery so you can actually freshen up and, and you know, train at another level from where you're at. And, and that is one of the key things that people kind of don't understand is when we say recover hard, we're actually trying to allow your body to absorb the training load. And, and that's one of, from a coaching point of view, that is probably the key, the key, most important thing as well as having a really good program for our athletes, I've got to make sure that I allow them to recover so that they can, as we use the stair climb example of, you know, training hard, recover, going up to the next level, training hard, recover. So you just continually doing this stair climb and you're wanting to add a little bit more improvement on every block that you do like losing weight. You shouldn't try and lose weight in two weeks. You should do it over a long period of time. You shouldn't try and go from a level of ability to two weeks time. Your ultimate, you know, you've got to have a big plan for this. And if recovery is not in this plan, you will do well for a period of time. And there's no exact period, but in my experience as a coach, some people can go for six to eight weeks really slogging it out and training the house down and getting good results. And then all of a sudden they start to get a plateau and then the plateau becomes a hole they're digging and they're like, you just gave the example of the diamond league guys, just miles off girls as well, miles off their pbs. And you know, two weeks ago they were in the form of their life. How's that possible? It's the same person, but in my mind it's totally to do with you can't hold your form forever and recovery has to be part of your program and if you disregard it, then you're going to fall into those categories that you said, plateauing or injuring yourself. And as I added, you know, going backwards. So, so yes, it is a really important topic to cover, yet it is so limited in its, in its how well it's spoken about and recovery, whatever. Well, no, you know, you have a training load that you are absorbing and your body adapts to it and the minute you don't let an adaptation happen, then you'll plateau straight away.

Yeah, well, I love one of the angles that you come from with it is that people just think, oh, it's time to recover, I just won't do anything. And you say no, no, no. Recovery is a training session in itself. It's something you have to treat it like a session that you do properly. What are you going to do to recover? Well, you know, recover hard, as we said at the start.

Yeah. And everybody's got their own version of that. And whether it's, you know, if you're a cyclist, should you get on the bike and just roll along at 100 watts and you have your heart rate at, you know, below 100. Is that helping? Yes, it is. Is walking as good? Probably. But my main thing as a coach is that I want you moving, I don't want you on your recovery day sitting still. And if, if you don't walk or ride, as long as you've. For example, if you're a construction worker, you probably don't need to ride or walk on that recovery day because you're doing all that all day anyway. It's not like you're sitting at a desk, but if you're a desk worker, you definitely need to get out of that chair for some period of that recovery day to actually move. And as we know, blood flow carries oxygen. Oxygen repairs damaged muscles. So if you're sitting still, and I've experienced this from a hard weekend and Monday, I've sat down the chair for too long. I stand up, I feel stiff as anything. But if I've actually got up every hour and moved around, I don't feel half as bad. And that's just anecdotal for me. And it is absolutely imperative that I don't sit still for four or five hours on a trot. You shouldn't do that anyway. But I am going to be better by Tuesday if I've done some active recovery. And, you know, you've got to find out what works for you. And definitely I would do both an easy ride and a walk. And that sets me up again for if I'm in a middle of a hard block, sets me up for the hard Tuesday session. If that's my day where I'm doing intensity, or if I'm doing a recovery week period, doesn't have to be a week, can be recovery four days or whatever you've got in your program, then I'm going to progress from light, light duties to a little bit more. And they're all in zone one and two. They're not, they're not trying to do anything until, you know, until you've had at least four days of, of really looking after yourself and, and letting your body absorb the load that's just happened in the previous period.

So talking about absorbing a load of a training block you touched on just before that, you finish a two week period. And it's something we probably do a little bit different at Tribello because you can do a two, three or four week block and we tend to gear much more towards a two week block for various reasons. So why do we do two weeks instead of three or four weeks?

And there's always going to be not just one reason why we do that. And let's just take these last two years compared to the previous year or the previous four years. I would be much more happy to do maybe three week block rather than a two week block in a normal non Covid period. But in a Covid period that is a reason for me because we would spend a lot more time generally on the trainer indoors. Various parts of Australia or the world for that matter, have, have had lockdown experiences where you can't actually go more than 5km outside of your radius or you've got a time limit, a two hour window or a one hour window or, or that happens to be winter and the weather is, you know, snowing or sideways, sleeping, rain. So you're going to spend a little bit more time on the trainer. And, and that is really taxing because there is no relief on the trainer. As a, as a cyclist, you know, there's no free riding. Whereas outdoors you've got various times where you could be rolling down a hill and at the end of the day you, you're just not pedaling. Whereas I'm a trainer, that just doesn't happen. So, so we've got to work out, you know, what's happening in that particular period to determine whether you can strive for three weeks or four weeks or two weeks. And then it's determined by the type of athlete. You know, some of the younger fitter athletes at a higher level can tolerate more load. Some of the older athletes can't tolerate more than maybe 12 days without needing some recovery. Depends on their history of endurance. So there's never just one reason why, so to say, why do we do that? Well, we factor in a lot of things. The experience of the athlete, the level of the athlete, the period of history in time, such as Covid, the weather conditions. So the particular time that you are in your program aiming for your a race, if, if you've taken on a 30 week program, then you know, if you're doing something very steady at the start of the program, you can do three weeks no problem. But if you're at the Pointy end at the race ready phase, you know, you're struggling to manage two weeks because of the intensity. Cause you're, you're peaking to a, to a race. So, so they're examples of, of where one size doesn't fit all. And just because I might say, well, two weeks works well, that's what everybody should do. Well, it's actually not the case. Everybody is individual and generally it'll work across the board if we're all experiencing the same weather, the same conditions, the same taper, the same race that we're aiming for. But other people, they need to do a variety of that. And that is really important to understand that that can. The amount of time you train hard, you know, you've got to get the recovery sooner or later. So to answer the question, there's no real reason, exact one reason why we do it this way. But the other reason, the other point I want to make is that from our experience with dealing with all sorts of abilities, all sorts of ages in our coaching group, we have that. We have beginner, intermediate and elite. We have young and very old.

I do want to say on that point, we get a lot of questions from people who want to get coached by Trevalo and say, I'm just a beginner though. I know you only coach elite athletes or expert athletes. That's not the case. We coach beginner right through to elite. So just want to make that point. Sorry, dad, continue.

Absolutely, yeah. And look, we've got, we've got guys who are 70 and over, you know, and I'm not far away from that. And we've got people, we've got people who are, you know, in their teens, who are at the other end of the spectrum who can't wait to train, you know, every day in a row for 40 days in a row, you know, and they'll do that if you tell them to do that. So we do experience and see all types of athletes. So there is not one fit for everyone. You can't just fit one recovery program to everybody because we've got such a range of abilities.

Abilities, yeah. Um, so to summarize, kind of why we lean this way at the moment, it's because again, like you said, various factors, but basically you're saying people can train harder indoors. And so they're probably training harder over a two week block, but it's affecting them a little bit more. So you tend to want a recovery week sooner because they're getting more out of the hard sessions but need a bit more break.

Yeah. Yeah, it's so true. And, and I probably didn't make that point very well that the reason why I was mentioning the difference between indoor and outdoor is because it is just so relentless indoor and you definitely can't sustain a longer training block as well as you can from our experience as people are just training outdoors. Yeah. So, you know, there are exceptions to every rule. So for me to say that that's going to happen to everybody, that's actually not true. But in general would find that I'm definitely, you know, in our, we are conservative. We don't want to be pushing the limit to see people break. That's never our intention and we don't want that to be our intention. We want like everything, if you do something that's extreme, it's going to be unsustainable. So we want it to be balanced and progress with the big picture and have a journey idea concept in your mind and that will allow you to gradually progress and not drive yourself into the ground where you end up sick because you've overtrained. And that's why the recovery topic is so crucial.

Yeah, we would rather be conservative, hold athletes back, sacrifice maybe some potential improvement, but with the types of improvements that we get, and it might be arrogant to say, but with, with the improvements that we get across the board, we're happy with the rate of improvement. We're happy to sacrifice the absolute max potential gain to really lower the risk of injury, illness over training, crashing and burning and.

Yeah, yeah, look, the old sentence was short term pain for long term gain. And you know, the opposite of that is, you know, just training so hard that you end up suffering, you know, no improvement whatsoever after, As I said, five or six weeks of doing that, then you spend the next 18 months the same athlete or getting worse. So it's certainly something that I, I'm not a fan of and, and I'm a big fan of, of recovery being a major part of the program.

I guess the overarching principle is in a training program, you want to make your hard sessions as hard as you can handle and then your easy sessions really easy so that those hard sessions can be hard so that you, you recover from them and you get that. Your actual training and adaptation.

Yeah, what you just said is spot on and people need to actually stop and think about what you just said because the example I could give is, you know, right at the minute we're in a really difficult block of training, which is one of the hardest sessions that we do, one of the hardest blocks and this is an example when people are telling me in their comments, oh my God, I nearly never got to the finish of that session. And, and that reminds me straight away, we rode a little bit too hard in your recovery session and I bet you're regretting that now. So in order to train harder, you need to recover more harder. And that, that's, you know, that's the opposite to what we mean. We want you to really take it easy in your, it's not a fitness gain training session, it's a recovery session so that you can train as hard as you can possibly train. And if you're, if you're recovering too hard, as in, you know, training, training at a level that's, you know, not recovery, you can't hit the targets in the hard session. And that was brought home and you know, one of the sessions during the week where it was extremely hard and a lot of people failed and if you look back at what they did in their recovery day, it was too hard.

And once you get to a deload week, a recovery week, there's a bit of a mental game, isn't there? Because on one hand, you know, again, we're a little bit more conservative. We tend to back off the load a little bit and you can be left feeling a little bit sluggish rather than recovered. And there's also this mental game of if you have had a really hard block, you know, getting in your head about how fatigued you are and whether the fatigue is just psychological or physical, it doesn't really matter because if you believe you're fatigued, then, you know, you really need to get a handle of that yourself. And so it is a really, it's quite a complex question process going through this deload week. I know you deal with this with athletes often with these multiple factors happening. And how do you talk through that with athletes?

I was thinking of the example you're, when you're talking there in the Olympics. There was, I don't know, it wasn't, it was another, it might have been a diamond league where they miscalculated the laps of one of the events and.

And they rang the bell a lap early.

I think it was a 5K. And the guys, the guys on the track, I mean, they know what their 5k time is. So when they were going to get the bell lap and they were at 11 minutes for 5K now about to do some, you know, 42nd world record. Yeah, they must have been questioning the bell lap counter guy. Anyway, they half the field sprinted to the finish. And then some of the other guys cottoned on that that wasn't the finish. There was still another lap because the bell got rung again for the sec. But psychologically, that's the analogy I want to. I want to compare is because you're racing, because you think this is the last lap. And then the guys who finished first and second were all looking at each other and they heard the bell. When they finished, went across the finish line, they, well, I've got another lap. Well, they were done mentally, they were. And physically they were. They'd done everything. And. And it was interesting watching the two guys. One guy got his act together and then started going again, and the other guy was done mentally. He just could not get it together till halfway down the back straight. I don't know if you remember that race, and that's kind of how. Obviously there's physical tiredness there from the training block from doing a lap too fast with a lap to go. But you can go again. If I tell you, Jordan, you're tired and you need a rest, you will believe that because that's what I've told you and you trust that I know what you're feeling. But if I said to you, now you're good to go, you can have another week of this, you'll trust that as well. And you're relying on the fact that I'm using good evidence from your training data to give you that information. And you will be amazed at how someone just reminding you that you're able to do that. And in that case of doing it, the lapse too short. Well, I know there's still a lot to go, so I can decide whether I want to try or whether I want to just give up. And you can go again if you have the right mindset. But we don't want it to be. We want it to be more real rather than motivating you telling you can go again. We want to actually know that we are getting it right. So that's why we have a lot of data to look at to measure where you're at and not to see your fatigue level over 40 where it shouldn't be. And, you know, the minute it gets to that point, you know, you need to be stopping training altogether almost sort of to give yourself time to recover. So, you know, and. And of course, the data has to be accurate. So. So sometimes when we're having a recovery period, our body seems not to cope that well. We feel a little bit tired and flat. And whether that's psychological or Actual, actually real. It's hard to measure, but it is a common theme that I get feedback from that I don't feel so good this week. And the point about that is the body will adapt to hard training. It'll adapt to easy training, it'll adapt to no training. It does have a period where it needs to adapt, though. So as we build in the hard training sessions, the body will cope better as you. As you go through the session. Just like if you did an individual session where you're doing four heel repeats and the first one just feels crap because you're not used to the hill repeat. And then by the time you get to the third one, your body's like flowing and, you know, and you're really performing well. And it seems so much easier than the first effort. The same thing happens with the body adapting to the training block. And the same thing is obviously going to happen to adapting to recovery. You know, it's not used to it. And the body doesn't like change, it likes to be doing the same thing. So the minute you go from hard to all of a sudden easy, the body's going, what are you doing to me now? I was getting used to training hard. Now you're forcing me to do easy stuff. And it takes two or three days. And then, you know, it's good to have in that recovery period a good rest and recovery period, and then start with a little bit of intensity in that period just to remind the body that it's not all, you know, rest and recovery. It's. It's still, you've got to train through this period, but we're just reducing the intensity so we're getting rid of fatigue. So the body can not only adapt, but absorb the training load that it's been exposed to in the previous two weeks or three weeks or six weeks that you've. Whatever you've been doing.

Yeah, that's a really good point because what you're talking about there is that if you, if you take a deload week, for example, if you just remove all intensity and do a lot a week, your body actually will detrain itself. Um, and that's just a natural adaptation of the body, which is why the aim is to keep some intensity in throughout the week, reduce the overall volume, but keep some intensity in there. And we call it, you know, waking the body up, waking the legs up, and we sure, we have a few days of just pure recovery. Um, but in these deload weeks, we make sure there's one intensity day, you know, it doesn't have to be the biggest intensity day of your block. It's just a intensity day. We have, um, you know, we have these, these ride and run waking up the leg sessions where it's a zone two style effort, whether it's on the bike or running, but with short efforts, you know, short, you know, race pace or race intensity efforts. Um, and just those little things throughout the week, keep the body going, almost keep the engine running. Plus one intensity day. Um, and that allows you to get through the week with minimizing that D training adaptation that you're talking about, um, while recovering, lowering the volume and not having the same amount of intensity as a normal training week.

Yeah, it does sound a little bit complicated, I know to the listener, but, you know, what are you trying to achieve here? Well, you're just trying to get rid of fatigue. That is basically the fatigue that you've accumulated. Why is that happening? Because you're training hard. And why are you doing that? Because you want to improve. So in order to improve, you need to do harder training sessions. With that harder training session comes fatigue.

That's.

They go together. Training hard improvement has a byproduct, which is fatigue. So we want to do that for a period and then stop the intensity. So we're not expecting to improve during that period where we're just aiming to improve our fatigue. That is the goal of, of the recovery week. And as you said, you can throw in tiny little bits of intensity here and there that are not going to actually add to the fatigue load. And we're not talking about a full session, you know, during the early part of the recovery week. You're just doing everything you can to get rid of the fatigue. And then, and obviously the volume is decreased, you know, by a massive amount. And then you just do some, some type of activity that's going to remind the body that, you know, I still can do intensity and it's not going to affect my fatigue level. So by the time you get to, you know, the fourth or fifth day of your recovery, your fatigue level should have dropped by, you know, 50%. And then you're ready to actually resume and start again from a new level. Your body's absorbed all of the gains it made in the fitness. It's now got rid of the fatigue and you're starting from another level. And that's how the staircase effect happens. And without this recovery week, that's not going to happen. You're going to get an angled increase and then you're going to get the top of the Mountain, a flat top of the mountain, or you could end up with a peak and start going down the other side where your fatigue level falls and so does your fitness.

Level, either a big plateau or a big descent, which is just the opposite of what we want.

Yeah, so. So as much as the motivated athlete doesn't like the easy week, if, if he can understand that it's for his, his improvement, for his betterment, then they'll be on board with it. And that's the beauty of coaching people who are willing to trust you 100%, whether you're a beginner or whether you're an elite. Everybody needs this recovery period. And it varies according to your historic ability as an athlete, whether you've been doing it a long time or whether you've been doing it five minutes. That varies about how much intensity you can be given and how much recovery.

You can be given.

So, so there is not one, one fit for everybody. But that, that is what we're trying to say is no matter what standard athlete you are, everybody needs to have recovery period. And for someone to say that they don't need to recover, that will be true. And it will last five or six weeks. And then, and then they'll be wondering what's happened in the last 12 months, why they've actually stayed the same or even worse, got worse.

We've had plenty of examples of that where a really highly motivated athlete has, you know, said to you they want to do more. And then they hit a crossroads. And you say to them as the coach, this is what's going to happen if you do more. You can either go to go down the path of, you know, injury, illness, burnout, or you can change the path now back it off a little bit. And in 12 weeks, you will have completed 12 weeks of consistent training in 24 weeks, in six months, you will complete the six months of uninterrupted training and you're going to be so much further ahead. And some athletes take your advice and do it. And six months down the track, they are in a really good spot. Some athletes think they know better, and like you said, within six to eight weeks, they're completely burnt out. You know, we often track athletes weekly scores of. And the score can come from how many sessions do they complete. Green, you know, how many sessions do they complete? Well, how many sessions did they miss? And those athletes that go down the wrong path by the six to eight week mark, suddenly they're completing zero out of eight sessions for the week. You know, it's not just like they're completing five out of eight. They just completely fall off.

Yeah. And you can go one step further. What you've said is, is absolutely accurate. You can go one step further. And some athletes have gone, I don't need the recovery, I'll just rest and I'll just train the house down on the hard sessions. I'll actually train harder than on mass to go over the ranges that are set and have, you know, unbelievably great training sessions and just do three of them out of the seven days and, and you know, are happy with themselves. That's their mindset that they've actually, they've actually, you know, and that will work for a period of time. It will, you will improve. And the thing that's lacking is the consistency and you know, two or three massive sessions doesn't make a program or a year or an improvement. It is really short term and it's not big picture thinking because the body again will adapt to, I only have to train three times a week. And then the minute you start to put more load into it because all of a sudden you want to do a fourth session, you actually can't cope. And that's when you get sick all time the or you get injured. So not smashing above the ranges in the high intensity, but doing what you're supposed to be doing and making sure that you're consistently training the recovery days in between or whatever the other sessions are, it's in your program will make you a better athlete than just doing the, you know, the three hard things a week for six weeks and you know, put those two athletes side by side and the guy who's been consistent and stuck with the program will be streets ahead.

Yeah, and that's a really good segue to how we wanted to finish off the episode. And that's to talk about specific recovery interventions because when you recover, like we said at the start, you can opt to do nothing and that's your recovery. But that's not what we want. You know, there's ways to do recovery sessions as well as there's specific recovery interventions that you can have a look at and we want to discuss some of them now. Some of the options you have to help enhance your recovery. And some of the main ones are message, you know, compression, the Normatec boots, you know, compression boots have become very wildly popular self massage guns. Obviously sleep is a major factor in your recovery. Nutrition is a major factor. You spoke in detail about active recovery at the start of the episode. And it must be said that all These intervention aids are great. But one point we wanted to make is that the evidence for these isn't actually that strong. But it's not always about that, is it? It's, it's a combination of, you know, finding what works for you and your own experience, knowing that something like active recovery even hasn't actually got empirical evidence proving that it is. It improves performance, you know, but you yourself, you said, and I would absolutely vouch for this as well, if I do some active walking in a recovery session or recovery week, I absolutely helps me feel better. Whether that's purely psychological or not doesn't matter for me.

No. And that's what we want to find. We want to find what makes you feel better. And if in whether you're placebo feeling better or not, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter the reason, as long as you actually do feel better. And if you feel worse by doing that and it's. And you've given yourself a chance to adapt to it and you still feel worse than, then you might need to rethink that. But there's some really Good, you know, 1 percenters as we call them, and you know, as you say, that it's all about making you feel better about the next session. And for example, on a Saturday big endurance ride, if that happens to be the day where you do your endurance ride. I know if I don't do anything on the Friday, and I'm talking do anything, walk or do an easy recovery ride rather than just do nothing, the first part of my Saturday endurance ride is not that fun. It feels like I haven't written for a few days. Well, I actually haven't written for a day, but it just feels like I've had, you know, days off. It takes me hour and a half to get into the, into the ride sort of thing. So when I've done something on the Friday, whether it's, it's actually physiological adaptation or just mental, I feel better for doing it. So I'm going to do that. And this is the same with massage. Do you feel better after a massage? Well, if you do, then keep doing it. If you text me saying I couldn't do the next day's session because I had such a deep tissue massage that I couldn't actually ride the next day, well, that's not helpful. That's something you shouldn't do. You should ask the masseur to go easier on you so that you can actually. Or reschedule the massage for another day. Do it on the day after you've had your, or do it on the day of your high intensity, after the high intensity session. So you're not compromising the actual training program. And you know, massages are good for the, for the recovery week. If you can only have one once a month, then that's, or once every three weeks or whatever your, your period of training is, that's good. But you know, scheduling things like this, like hard massages, when you want to actually train hard and it's hurting you, that's not a good, a good, a good idea. And I would, you know, really hesitate to recommend that, that you know, just because you have a massage on a Monday and then every Tuesday you struggle, it's just not, you just don't want that in your program. So, you know, I'm a big believer in massage and whether it's self massage or you know, using the gun or getting someone to massage your legs or your back or whatever it is, it works for me. But you know, as I said many times, it doesn't actually work for everybody. So those who've never tried it should try it. Those who have used it and don't think it works, then that's exactly what you should do, not not use it again. And those who are happy with it, keep doing it.

It's an absolutely brilliant point. I was just going to say our traveller physiotherapist, Matt Donnelly. So my older brother, he just had a really brilliant point on, on this when you're thinking about interventions and he just spoke about whenever anyone in healthcare is looking at patient intervention, whether it's physio, osteo, anything in the health care system, there's a triangle of effectiveness essentially for the intervention. And the first part is what does the science say? You know, what do we know is factual knowledge of what can help. And then the second part is what does the practitioner or the coach in your example know as part of their experience and what they've, how they've seen it work in real life, applicable examples. And the third part is what does the client want? What does the athlete actually prefer? What you know, subjectively helps them. And all three parts of the triangle are imperative in the intervention process. And Matt just made a really good point that he's really on our back about making sure that anything we're doing in Trivalo is science based, which is very nice to have. It's good to have that knowledge behind us. But he's also aware that some professionals are so science based in their lens that they just cannot apply it to real World examples. And they're not taking into account the other part, which is what the athlete actually wants. And some of the problem with a lot of scientific interventions is that they're of kind consistently inconclusive because it's hard to get well balanced, objective results from studies. It's just, it's really hard to do that a lot of the time. And so you do have to take into account, you know, coaches experience and practice, practitioner experience. And you do have to take into account what the athlete feels is good for them as well. So he made a good point about massage. What you're talking about saying that there actually isn't that much evidence to say that massage, you know, improves recovery or performance. But he himself as a physio will always opt for massage as a treatment because of his experience. And in your case is your own example, your own experience is that massage is super helpful. So with all these interventions, you've got to take all parts of the triangle into account when you're thinking about this. And one last point I wanted to make on that was the act of recovery. You know, I'm surprised that, you know, some of the research articles I've read on it that, you know, active recovery, the premise is essentially to help remove, you know, lactate levels. Um, that is the premise of it. And a lot of studies found that that didn't happen. Um, and we had a pretty interesting personal example with you where you did a hard session on the Thursday night and then did a VO2 max test the next day. And you'd done a cool down and everything. Um, but the next day you started the VO2 Max test and your blood lactate levels, he was shocked at how high they were in the first 10 seconds. He goes, because he takes the first you lactate levels at the very start just to see what your starting baseline is. And he kind of said, this isn't right. You know, what have you done this morning? Um, and then after two or four minutes of pedaling, he took your blood lactate level again and it was half of what it was when you started the session. Um, and it took that two to four minutes of pedaling to almost remove that excess lactate from your body. And so that to me would be an indicator of real life application of active recovery working. And I know that again, that's not empirical evidence, but it's a point worth making in when you're thinking about this triangle.

Yeah, and that's what I was trying to say before, you know, I definitely ride better the next day if I'VE had some active recovery. And, you know, that lactate measurement proved it to me and I didn't need that. I didn't need that to prove it. I knew that from the feel I had. But it was good to get that, you know, back up to make sure it wasn't always, it wasn't in my imagination. It's just, it is actually real. But like, in terms of the specific interventions we're talking about, I just think sleep is one of the key things that, you know, can't be underestimated. And, you know, whenever anybody's sick, what is the natural go to as a human? What do we do? We want to sleep. And, and whenever you've got a cold or a flu or a virus, you just feel like sleeping. And, and why? Because that's the body's way of, you know, stopping you from really pushing yourself. So the minute you're sleeping, you're just shutting everything down and, and letting, letting the body do its thing whilst it's sleeping. And we know that, you know, amazing things happen during sleep in terms of muscles rejuvenating and blood flow and oxygen and cell rejuvenation. Yeah. And, and so, you know, get sleep. That's if you want to do something good for yourself and get better recovery, get more sleep. And, and that can be as simple as rather than going to bed at 11:30 and getting up at 5:30, go to bed at 10:30 and get another hour and then progressively get yourself to bed at 10. And then, you know, even if you can, between 9:30 and 10 and all of a sudden you've got two or three hours before midnight that you've, you know, normally you only get five hours sleep a week, a night. And now all of a sudden you're up to seven and your body will amazingly feel better and the body will adapt to more sleep. Oh, I can't sleep that long. I just can't. I just, I just wake up. Well, you will adapt eventually. So I'm a, I'm a really big fan of sleep in recovery and I know, you know, from everything I've ever done when I'm feeling at my worst, if I just checked my aura ring and found, you know, what was my average sleep, it was four and a half hours. And that, you know, without even looking at it, I know what the, what the answer is. I didn't get enough sleep for the last four days and it, you know, it just gets overlooked a lot. What else can I do to recover better? Well, sleeping is doing nothing, but it's sleeping. And that is the best form of recovery.

Yeah. And sleep and nutrition are a little bit different to the other 1% as we're talking about because they have ample evidence behind them that they are absolutely vital in recovery and performance. That's without question. And I heard an interesting note recently about sleep is that the report was kind of saying that you need a certain amount of hours of quality sleep to recover. I don't know what the exact hours were. And so they were saying if you had only five hours sleep, but it was quality, that's as good as seven to eight hours of sleep with, you know, that quality section in there. It's just most people, if they had five hours sleep, don't get enough of the quality hours. But if you were, maybe you have a setup where when you do sleep it's unbelievable you are getting enough quality recovery. I know personally that I actually get quite angry at myself if I don't sleep properly. I feel like I'm wasting my hard sessions because I'm not allowing my body to recover. So that's how seriously you need to take it. Like a training session.

Yeah, exactly. And as a, as a person who does track their sleep and I'm shocked at the amount of deep sleep that I get told I've had last night. You know, it's supposed to be, you know, up to an hour of deep sleep and you know, last night I had seven minutes. You know, you just say, oh, this must be something going on in my mind that's keeping me. I'm sort of nodding. REM or deep. I mean, just, you know, light sleep mode the whole time and, and definitely eating food just prior to bed. I've noticed because I've been tracking it for quite a while. Definitely affects how I sleep and obviously there's digestion happening if I've eaten food just before I go to bed. So, you know, it is really good to have a period where you're two or three hours, you know, you haven't eaten something. And I, I get a much better sleep categorized reaction from deep and REM rather than the light sleep that it's telling me I'm getting every night. So there's lots of things that contribute to it. And obviously nutrition is a whole topic on its own in terms of recovery. But the times where I have a really big weekend, Saturday endurance ride and if I don't look after myself all Saturday afternoon, especially straight after the ride, and then get, you know, get as much nutrition in as I can, the right, the right fueling, so that by the time I get wake up for Sunday session, I'm actually okay if I neglect that on Saturday, my Sunday is really garbage, a garbage session. And, and it also, you know, the sleep contributes to that Saturday night sleep and you know, whether you've had alcohol that night, you know, all these things contribute to it. And it's up to you to choose, you know, what journey you want to be on. And I'm not saying to abstain from everything, but you've just got to look after yourself to get the most out of yourself. If you're going train this hard, why would you ruin it by not doing these 1 percenters? And as I say with everything moderation, you know, it's, it's, don't do things in extreme because they're unsustainable and do them, do them with a balance and moderation and you can do it forever. And getting, getting the right recovery after the right sessions, you know, I don't need to take recovery drinks after my recovery ride that. It's just not necessary. You know, hydration from water is enough. But on a big day where I've gone out for four to six hours, I'm going to need some sort of nutrition to help repair everything that I've damaged from that hard session and to neglect that. I know I don't recover better the next day.

Yeah, I guess to finish, kind of key question we wanted to finish the episode on is how do you actually know if you're well recovered? And there's many ways, you know, you could try and track it. But we had an interesting chat recently with an exercise physiologist who had an interesting answer to this question. And he basically just said, firstly, it's obviously athlete dependent, everyone's different. But secondly, are they able to complete the hard sessions? You know, are they able to complete the training program? If they are, then, you know, to the numbers set, to the intensity set, then they're obviously recovering well enough. And it's this fine line as a coach to push the athletes to see how much they can handle and keep trying to get the max out of themselves per session without crossing that line. And over training, over fatiguing, not allowing them to recover. And like we said before, we probably sit on the conservative side, but I love that answer because ultimately that's the, that's what we're trying to find. We're trying to find how much can you get out of yourself without overdoing it.

Yeah, and everybody's going to be different, like we've said right from the get go. You know, a lot of the elite athletes can handle way much more load than the entry level athletes that we coach, so we can push them further. But you know, the minute they start to not achieve in those important sessions, then it's, that's a. If you haven't already identified that, then, then that's a flag, you know, that you need to actually take note of. And if you get a note saying, oh, okay, you're halfway through that session, well, we've gone, you know, a few days too long with the intensity.

Great way to finish being a big episode. Talking all about recovery. It's a great topic to talk about, but we really wanted to come from the angle of how to approach it and how to understand it from an overall program perspective and how you should be approaching it from a mindset point of view. So we hope you've enjoyed this episode on recovery. Thanks always for listening and if you can leave us a five star review and a positive comment anywhere you find your podcast and Apple podcasts, it really does help us. Again, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.