Recovery

In yesterday's post I was writing about how long you should take between races and I mentioned that if you are going to put races close together then you should focus on recovery too. I thought that sounded like a good idea for a blog post and so here we are:

Now, while I am a qualified coach, I am not a nutritionist, massage therapist, physio or a whole long list of other things and so what I give here is going to be pretty high level, there is obviously going to be a whole bunch more specialist information out there. But here we go, high level overview of recovery.

First up:

Sleep:
The number one best way to recover from a race (or hard training) is to get sufficient sleep. This is your body's natural recovery system and so you might as well use it. When you deprive yourself of sleep you are robbing your body of its key opportunity to heal and adapt. Post race you want to make sure you are not just getting sufficient sleep, but probably a bit more than you would normally aim for. It is easy and free, so you might as well use it.

Nutrition:
After sleep, eating well after an event is the next most important thing you can do to aid in good nutrition. The classic approach is best, a bit of protein immediately after the event to promote healing and then after that just good quality food in sensible quantities. As good as that post race burger tastes, you probably don't want it being too much of a habit.

Okay so those are the two big ones. After that there are a bunch of other smaller things that can be done to also assist with recovery.

Massage:
Okay, so perhaps massage isn't that small a thing, but it probably isn't as beneficial as Sleep and Nutrition. However, if you aim is to get going and firing as soon as possible, getting somebody in to give you a good massage will really help. The benefits of a good massage are fairly obvious, reduces soreness, release tightness etc. Anecdotally I can certainly say that the races where I had a good massage immediately post race were the ones where I felt best in the week following.

Compression:
So compression is a funny one. Compression wear has become a fairly common sight at races, but as far as I am aware the jury is still out on the benefits of wearing compression during actual exercise. There seems to be a fair bit of anecdotal evidence for the benefits of compression during sport, but I am not sure how much real hard science is available. Anyway, that is sort of irrelevant because where compression originally came from was recovery. The original idea of compression wear was as something to help aid recovery and the science is pretty solid on it as far as I am aware. So get those tights on. Plus that way you can look like one of the cool kids too.

Keep moving:
Post Ironman usually the last thing you feel like doing is more exercise, but getting out and doing a bit of light recovery work can really be beneficial in working out the kinks and bumps. I usually wouldn't head out for a run post event, but an easy 60 minute of cycling, or a light swim can really help. You certainly want to be doing something the morning immediately after the event, and if you have done a 70.3 I would even say head out for a bit of recovery that day.

The flip side of this is also true, one thing I would be looking to NOT do post race is immediately jump on a plane or into a car and sit very still for the next 4 hours. Sometimes this is unavoidable, but it certainly will not aid in recovery.

So there we go, 5 little things to help get you feeling tip top post race as quickly as possible. Nothing particularly complicated, but it doesn't really have to be.