Recovery and Juniors

“Give a Man a Fish and Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man to Fish and Feed Him for a Life Time.”

The common metric for the amount of cross-country ski training done in a year is the total number of hours spent training in the different intensity zones.

One of the more vicious hazards of becoming pre-occupied with hours put in is missing or ignoring the hours NOT put in. These are important for all skiers, and for juniors they are doubly so. If kids have come to a year-round ski training program one would hope it was not for short term success. Junior programs should be in the business of building a solid and intelligent training foundation, and part of that foundation is knowing how to use time off.

Time off includes recovery hours. While we often enter them in a training plan as “Rest” or “Off” days, it is easy to forget how important it is that athletes know how to use that time. Recovery hours are as fundamental a building block as any other part of the training plan. It is during recovery hours that the work sinks in and when the body and mind refresh themselves. It can be both a conscious and a subconscious break in a routine that prepares us well for the next load. The tricky part is that rest and off days are easy to miss or to misuse. The athletes need to understand the part recovery time plays well enough to give it the same quality of attention they give to any other aspect of training.

Give a Man a Fish

In our training plans at Burke we often use the expression “OFF off” for a rest day and “Off” for a training recovery day. Here is how we present that to the group as a whole (individual plans get more specific).

[NB: Before you read one word further allow for the fact that this contains the highly personalized opinions and spins of someone who tends to be a judgmental old fart. Armed with that proverbial salt shaker, read on.]

“What do we mean by ‘OFF off?'”

That means no structured training and largely a day of below zone one activity; it allows and encourages an easy walk, easy mobility, and rest. Reading, music, homework, making food, etc. It does not mean staying up late and sleeping in, blubbing around your room with computer games, breathing stale dorm air all day, and consuming a steady diet of snack food. That ain’t “off, ” that is backwards! The day in bed is useful too if you are running a little sick; HR 10+ bpm higher than normal, any hint of fever, and any other signs of impending illness. For any recovery day to be most helpful you should be IN bed not later than 10 and out of it by 8:30-9:00 AM. Kids need more sleep, and getting it at the right end of the day lets it do the job better.

A day described with only one “off” can and should mean a light run, and easy ski, an easy hike, a low key field game. It doesn’t mean a full day of top to bottom Alpine skiing or a century ride with your Dad. Research has shown that recovery is quicker and residual waste is processed out of the muscles best by activity at around 60% of the max heart rate. That can be a slightly lower key version of our usual recovery intervals (which are explained later), and that type of work is also constructive in maintaining a base. If you are healthy and feeling good, but know that you are a little tired or have been working extra hard, then a session of sub level one (e.g. 120 bpm up to level one e.g.130-135 bpm on a 3 min / 6 min cycle repeated 3 -4 times) is always a good off day activity. It keeps fresh oxygen in the system, and moves waste products out without creating any fatigue. This type of session is part of recovery, but don’t let it sneak into compulsive guilt training and let the intensity creep up. The mind needs a break too. Let it go somewhere else. Mellow out, enjoy it.

This may be all very well as far as it goes. It provides a reasonable set of ideas as to how to use a recovery day, but it doesn’t go too far to explain why these days are valuable, even critical, in planning an increasingly advanced approach to training.

Teach a Man to Fish

The school of training thought with which I am most comfortable puts a high value on the athletes gaining an understanding of why we do what we do, and on developing confidence and independence in training. We try to share information in a way that is directly useful to them and gives them a greater sense of investment in their efforts.

How do we best exchange and share information? What do we need to know about recovery time, and what does the athlete need to know? In my mind the best and first approach is to establish open and frequent communication between coach and athlete. Any early experience and understanding the athlete has is just that, but we should regularly draw on it and point out how accumulating individual experience increases the knowledge of capacity, and personal physiological response to stress and stimulus. Seeking and respecting the athlete’s input, however novice or “green” it is, is important.  That builds mutual trust, a willingness to share thoughts, respect and a common purpose. Once established, that relationship becomes a powerful tool in effective information exchange.

If one of our goals is to help athletes become independent and self-confident, then we need to have concrete material to give them. Not rules—but ideas to discuss, to try on, to analyze and to digest. Kids like numbers. They seem less interested in and less convinced by anecdotal evidence. Having something concrete to go over with them can go a long way to convincing them that recovery is as important to moving ahead with training and ultimately going faster, as is any other single part of the foundation.

A good place to start is to review what we as coaches think we want and need from a recovery day; to revisit some of the science behind the idea and to see if we are consciously taking it into consideration and applying it in our programs for juniors. After that bring each athlete into the loop and clearly and simply share the principle of load and adaptation, of catabolic and anabolic processes, and the concepts of load, breakdown, recovery, and overcompensation. This goes a long way to letting kids see how interrelated all the work and rest is, and it encourages them to begin to develop an awareness of their own systems. Producing a diagram that illustrates the relationship between load and breakdown, recovery and repair, and eventual overcompensation and improvement over time will help involve the athlete much more effectively than simply saying, “Take today off.”

[While it isn’t the purpose of this article to go into detail on load and recovery one important related concept is worth considering; the load on an athlete is not only the load from a given workout, or series of workouts, but rather is the total load being carried. The total load is made up of additional factors from everyday life including relationships, school, social pressures, economics, family and work situations and the mass of stimuli and thoughts that bombard teenagers every day.]

A diagram can show how a hard load can weaken and break down the system, and how proper recovery can bring it back to a higher level. It can illustrate how new loads applied too soon or too frequently, and not allowing for full recovery, can turn the performance curve downward into overtraining.

“To avoid sickness or overtraining, the training plan ought to be designed such that the athlete achieves a complete recovery every two to four weeks.”  — Endurance, Olympiatoppen. 2005.

For Juniors from 14-16 years old,  I would be inclined to say recovery should happen every 6-10 days, and for 16-19 year olds, every 10-14 days. This is full recovery and would tend to require some time totally off.

We can look at hard numbers when it comes to determining how much recovery is necessary. The research has been done.

The book ENDURANCE -Training That Produces Results contains an interesting table that we can use as a starting place.

It compares the length of recovery times from work in different intensity zones, with the caveat that shorter periods of work require less recovery and that for the table the length of load is typical for the I-zone, i.e. an IZ 1 workout might be three hours and an IZ 4 workout might 30 minutes of total on time. On the far right of the table is the length of the “overcompensation phase” which occurs after a specific training load plus good and complete recovery and helps us gauge when to take the best advantage of the recovery process with the next session.

Average recovery times for well-trained endurance athletes after training in different intensity zones.

*As skiers we do not often exceed I Zone Five in training. The scale on the chart goes on to IZ 8. Everything over five is at thundering max heart rate and is of short anaerobic duration.

“Recovery time is also dependent to a large degree on the athlete’s total current life situation. A lot of stress in connection with work, studies, social and family situations can lengthen recovery time significantly.”

The thing that shouts out at me from this table is that, given all the other things that come into play with juniors we may, in our quest for filling in the hours, be short-changing vital recovery time. We are in the process of building a well-trained endurance athlete. We probably don’t have one yet so we should likely be ready to add time to the numbers here. If we rush it, or we completely trust the athletes’ own inexperienced evaluation of readiness without observing them closely, we may be asking for more than they can or should give; that is where the slippery slope to declining performance, chronic illness and overtraining can begin.

It helps to know as much about the individual athletes’ worlds as we reasonably can (living at home with an endorphin addicted Type-A parent can play hell on recovery time!), and we need to recognize that the hard workout doesn’t end when the sweat stops; it ends when good recovery time has passed and we are ready for the next and perhaps increased load. That comes back around to the importance of that relationship of communication between the athlete and the coach. It, too, needs to be trained and nurtured. Patience is key.

Having that in mind when we sit down to lay out the next plan is being forearmed and better guaranteed to come up with something good.

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