Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

by Christie Aschwanden

That carbs and protein are important for recovery is pretty certain, but the optimal amount and timing is less so.

The latest research shows that protein will help recovery whether you consume it before or even during exercise.

As researchers have accumulated more evidence, it’s begun to look as though the postexercise window just isn’t as crucial as it was initially made out to be, says McMaster

Sure, staying light can aid performance, but it’s a fine line. Eat too little and you become fragile and your performance and recovery suffer.

adaptation is the most important thing, and it’s worth giving up a little bit of performance in the short term if you can make bigger gains in the long run.

Massage is often explained as a way to push lactate and other waste products out of the muscle, but Halson says that “there’s no evidence to say that doing massage will clear lactate—it just doesn’t exist.”

massage performed shortly after exercise may increase protein synthesis in the muscle, at least in rats.

“Any fool can go train more. It takes courage to rest.”

True recovery requires nurturing a recovery mind-set—one that fully honors the body’s need to recuperate and senses when it’s time to chill. This attitude can be hard to cultivate in a culture that’s constantly bombarding us with messages to “go hard or go home.” We’re primed to push through the pain and do another mile or one more set. We celebrate “streakers” who run every day for years. But if your body isn’t recovering from and adapting to those runs, then you’re just logging junk miles that are wearing you down instead of building you up. I don’t mind celebrating those impressive people who keep their exercise streaks alive, but maybe we should lionize athletes who’ve mastered the art of resting

decreasing inflammation might actually be a bad thing if you’re hoping for a training response.

Nothing else comes close to sleep’s recovery-enhancing powers.

Research shows that people who are chronically sleep-deprived lose their normal perception of sleepiness and become poor judges of their neurocognitive performance,

“You think you’re functioning okay, but you’re not,” she says. You might be able to do rote

If you’re forced to pick between some extra shut-eye or an extra workout, it’s wiser to pick the sleep,

No better marketing than science. . . . that’s the problem with many supplement studies—they’re not scientific quests for truth, but marketing exercises designed to sell products.

I always wanted to do more.” It’s a common reaction among newbies—the thought that if a little bit of training gets you a small measure of success, a lot might get you much more.

events, I was always a big volume guy,” he says, referring to the high volume of miles he put in throughout his career. He pushed himself hard, always, and for a while this approach paid off.

After that, things started to fall apart. He finished second in the 2012 Olympic marathon trials, but then dropped out of the London Olympic marathon before the halfway mark, and he withdrew from that year’s New York City Marathon too, blaming fatigue.3 The following year, he planned to run the Boston and New York City Marathons, but didn’t start either one, owing to injuries. He didn’t finish another marathon again until 2014, when he crossed the line at the Boston Marathon in twentieth place, about nine minutes slower than in 2011. The following year, Hall attempted a comeback at the Los Angeles Marathon, but after a blazing start in which he went out with the leaders, he abandoned the race near the halfway mark, once again vanquished by a nagging fatigue.

overtraining syndrome is what happens when the stress of training no longer provokes adaptations, and instead throws an athlete spiraling into a prolonged state of fatigue.

They can no longer perform, but there’s nothing objectively amiss.

An unexplained drop in performance remains the hallmark symptom of overtraining syndrome.

What makes overtraining so tricky is that its symptoms, which also include muscle soreness, extreme fatigue, sleep problems, and mood disturbances (most often depression and/or anger), are very similar to those normally produced by very hard training.

With overtraining syndrome, however, the athlete’s performance doesn’t return to baseline, and the latest research suggests that it usually takes at least six months to get over

“If you’re sleeping well and you’re eating well and you have minimal life stresses, then potentially you can take a larger and larger training load.” Recovery is the limiting step.

the body’s ability to recover can be hindered by a multitude of factors—insufficient sleep, not enough rest between hard efforts, poor nutrition, a bothersome cold virus, or, commonly, psychological stress. To the body, Halson says, stress is stress, whether it comes from a hard workout, a competition, a romantic breakup or, if you’re a student-athlete, the anxiety of final exams.

He’d worked so hard in the buildup to that race that he was afraid that by resting he would lose his hard-won fitness.

Chris Lieto, a professional triathlete whose breakthrough second-place finish at the 2009 Hawaii Ironman came after hiring Dixon, who cut his training hours by about a third and put more emphasis on nutrition and sleep.

me, ‘I’ve never met an endurance athlete who’s eating enough food.’

My body felt really hot all the time, even at night.”

Sticking to the plan felt stressful, not because the workouts were too hard, but because she had to adjust her life around them.

prolonged, heavy exertion can suppress the immune system, and this “open window” of impaired immunity can last between 3 and 72 hours.

Factors like insufficient sleep, stress, weight loss, or poor nutrition can exacerbate the problem.

overtraining syndrome is that once you get it, there is no cure. The

“Not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured counts.”

range. If you wake up with an elevated heart rate, that’s a sign of fatigue.

they rarely tell me anything I didn’t already know. When I finish a workout, I don’t need to look at my watch to know if it was hard or easy or how tired I’m feeling. If

A measure that I’ve found far more useful (at least for endurance training) is the “Training Stress Score” calculated by Training Peaks, an online and app-based program for synching and analyzing training data collected from sports watches and apps.

The studies on training load and injury risk are imperfect, Drew says, but they all show pretty much the same result—that the greatest risks lie at very low and very high training loads.

Athletes need to be realistic about how much currency they have.

What makes tracking and data analysis so appealing is also what makes it dangerous—it conveys a sense of certainty that the science cannot yet deliver.

One of the most important things an athlete needs is confidence to listen to their bodies and trust in their training program.

Whether it was a nagging fatigue that I wished I didn’t have or the twinge in my hamstring that reappeared at inconvenient times, my knee-jerk response for too long was to cover my ears and say, nah-nah-nah, I don’t hear you!