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Rest Your Way to Fitness
When developing riders want to improve, naturally the thing they focus
on is their training. Usually they take the "more is better"
approach, piling on more hours, miles, and intensity. To a point, those
are the basic ingredients for getting stronger; you train hard, you get
better. While it may be somewhat true, it's only half the story.
The important part of your training is not just the training, but more
importantly, the resting. In previous articles I've written about the
cyclical nature of training and the process of stressing a system, letting
it heal and adapt to the stress, and then stressing it again at a higher
level. The hard training you do is the stress you place on your body.
The improvement, however, doesn't come in the training; it comes in the
adaptation to the training. The adaptation doesn't happen without rest.
Rest is where the actual growth and increase in your fitness takes place.
What does it mean to rest, then, and what is the difference between rest
and recovery? Many times you'll see a rider with that far away look in
their eyes--they're struggling to finish races they should be winning,
they can't sleep at night, maybe they've even got a cold sore. The usual
response when a rider gets dropped is, of course, to go home and do more
training. Sometimes someone will at least have enough sense to say, "hey,
man, you need a rest week." What, however, does a rest week or even
just a rest day entail?
When we talked about training in cycles before, we talked about a 3-on,
1-off structure, both in terms of days and weeks. Three days in a row
of training, followed by a day of rest, or three weeks in a row of training,
followed by a week of rest. In previous articles I detailed the training
part; here I'll detail the recovery.
Single days of rest can take on two different forms: rest or recovery.
After a week of hard training and a weekend of racing, Monday is an easy
day for most people. I like to describe this day as a recovery day, rather
than a rest day. Recovery implies you're trying to heal from what you've
just done, rather than thinking ahead and resting to be fresh for what's
coming up. It's a matter of semantics, but I feel it helps clients understand
what their goals for the day really are. The best way to recover and clear
lactic acid from a hard weekend is ideally to ride, but life can often
get in the way of your perfect training plans. Monday's recovery day can
be a day completely off the bike for both mental and physical healing.
If you've got limited training time, it might be the day you get caught
up on sleep, school, work, or skip your ride in lieu of a weekly massage.
If you can ride, 1-2 hours easy in a light gear at a high cadence will
help you clear your legs, recover more quickly, and keep your muscles
open and ready to train again on Tuesday. In some cases, you might find
that you need two days to recover, and won't be ready to train until Wednesday.
For many of my clients who have stressful full-time jobs, and especially
for my mountain bike racers, this is often the case.
The second easy day of the week is more of a rest day than a recovery
day, and should come two days before an important event on the weekend.
If you have races on both Saturday and Sunday, you'll ideally want to
sacrifice a day of training during the week by taking your rest day on
Thursday, and then doing some light training on Friday to open up for
the race. If the race on Saturday isn't a priority, then you can continue
to train through Thursday, rest on Friday, and then race both days. If
the race is only on Sunday, you can again train normally during the week,
rest on Friday, and then simply open up on Saturday with a light workout.
On a larger scale, entire weeks of recovery serve the same purposes. After
3-5 weeks of progressive training where the workload is increasing each
week, you're body will reach a point where it has to have some extended
time to heal. If you don't give your body that time, it will force you
to take it by getting you sick, or at the very least letting some staleness
creep into your form. This is where most riders make the mistake of going
back and training more, which of course only digs their whole deeper.
After 2-3 weeks of training, your body will begin to adapt to the stresses
you place on it with training. Sometimes you can push that adaptation
with a 4th or 5th week of training, but you often run the risk of overtraining
in that case, and so should always proceed with caution. As a general
guide, an easy week of training should consist of 25-50% of the volume
of duration and intensity of the heavy training week that proceeded it.
If you got in 14 hours as your longest week, 6-7 hours will be sufficient
as a rest week. If you got in 30 hours, then 10-15 is more appropriate.
If you did an hour at threshold on your interval day, 15 minutes on your
rest week is more than enough.
If a client finishes their last week of training with very good form and
feeling strong, then I'll typically allow them to have Monday as a recovery
day, and then proceed with a typical training week but with greatly reduced
intensity and volume. This then works as more of a rest and taper than
a complete recovery week, and will leave them open and still riding well
in the races that weekend without any interruption in their good form.
If, however, they finish somewhat overdone I'll have them take a day off,
and then ride 1-2 hours easy each day until the first day they can ride
without soreness or pain and have regained enough mental freshness to
handle structured training again. That may happen as soon as Wednesday,
as late as Friday, or in a worst case scenario, not at all. With deep
recovery weeks like this one, the body goes into full healing mode, and
the first week of training that follows is often a painful one as you
force the body open again. Typically, though, by the end of the first
or second week back, you'll feel on top of things again and should be
racing well.
It can be difficult to rest properly--much more difficult than training.
Paradoxically, training hard is just about the easiest thing a rider can
do. Anyone can go out and bang their heads against a wall to get better,
and riders often let their egos get the best of them by thinking "more
means more." Resting takes discipline, patience, and intelligence;
because it's actually more difficult to do than training hard, it naturally
will yield the biggest results.
There are many effective adages out there that will help you remember
how important it is to rest. "Train harder and rest easier."
"Put the same emphasis on resting as you do on training." "Be
as intense about resting as you are about training." I feel as if
I've said those words in every possible form to make the point. While
they might be clichés, they get repeated often for a reason. Take
the advice to heart--rest with same discipline, dedication and self-control
you put into your training, and you'll see the effects for yourself.
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