Respecting Rest & Recuperation: Mar ‘24

Hey there, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance and we hope that your Easter weekend has been a good one?

Here’s this month’s In-Form newsletter, swooping in at the last minute! 💨

In this edition of the newsletter, we wanted to talk about a principle we often find ourselves sharing and reminding athletes of in our day-to-day coaching and consulting work, and that’s respecting recovery.

When we as ambitious cyclists ponder on how we’re going to go about improving our fitness, our minds tend to go straight to questions about what we can do to optimise the part of our training where we induce a stress:

Which interval sessions should we be performing? Are our steady rides long enough? Should we be riding more or less intensively than we currently are?

Of course, this is a huge part of the puzzle and it’s also arguably the most nerdy and interesting part too! 🤓 

However, seldom do we give the same degree of thought to whether our training program, over a given week or month for instance, features enough recovery to allow us to positively adapt to the stress we’re imposing though…

As coaches, we see time and again training programs that are hyper-detailed and precisely laid out (which is great!), but where we simultaneously struggle to find sufficient recovery time balancing out the stress part of the equation! 

Fully appreciating the level of physiological impact coming from your workouts each week is one thing, but it’s easy to forget about the many other stressors that are present in our lives too (including work, family life, quality of sleep etc), all which contribute to our “training readiness” and the body’s ability to get stronger in response to our workouts.

We think it’s prudent to go back and look at training you might have planned for yourself with a consideration for rest and recuperation and try to critically evaluate whether you have the balance right… 

If any questions arise in your mind about whether things may be leaning a little too far in the direction of too many workouts and not enough rest, we’d definitely recommend trying out a week or two with a bit more recovery than you’d usually allow yourself and see how you feel, particularly if you have a habit of getting burnt out or feeling like your progress has stagnated. 

As we’ve mentioned in articles and previous newsletters, a lot of what good training is about is hitting on the right dose of training for you as an individual, suited to your current global stress environment. We’ve found that quite often it’s the case that athletes ARE riding enough to stimulate a positive adaptive response, but aren’t quite resting enough to see the response fully come to fruition.

So, if you fit this profile and you’re thinking “hmm, that sounds a bit like me” then your homework is set! Hopefully you’ll find that in taking a little step back, you can benefit from a really easy way to actually improve your fitness yield 👍

News

Tom recently spoke to Simon of the GoOff podcast about hill climbing and coaching - you can check out the show and episode here.

-

As always, we have our range of premium resources available, including the Cycling Physiology Guide, The Hill Climb Handbook, and our ever-expanding range of training plans (which we’ll be adding some more MTB-specific plans to in the coming weeks).

Thanks as always for your time and we’ll see you next month - happy riding until then!

Tom and Emma