What recovery means
Imagine you are playing a game,
diving to the bottom of a pool, starting in the shallow end and each successive
time you dive in you move further and further into the deep end.
As
you begin, not having to go very deep at all you only take a small inhale. Why load up on air if you don’t need to?
As
you progress though, you will have to take deeper breaths to make sure you have
enough to last you all the way to the bottom and back up.
Now
Imagine not coming up for air, or taking equally short breaths in the deeper
end as you did in the shallow? How far would you get? How hard would it be? Could you even keep it up?
So
here is how the metaphor breaks down. The dive is your workout; the coming up
for air is your recovery.
Without
recovery you will not be training very hard (depth) or very long (repeated
dives).
The
second aspect of this metaphor is about the time above the water
breathing. The deeper you go, meaning
the harder you training, the longer your recovery time. If you try to keep the
same recovery time even as you get into your training groove and find the power to go harder, bad things will happen
(hopefully not brain damage). The harder
you train the more critical recovery.
There
is one more twist we can throw in here. While you are recovering are you
treading water, or have you learned and practice the skills to float. Which uses up more energy? And which will let you recover sooner and get
back to diving deeper? This is to say not all recovery is the
same. Just taking a day off is not the
same as doing some stretching or very light (walking) cardio.
More
things to plug into your internal vetting machine as you move through the
potential maze of training.
Stay
on course True Believers.
