Listening to your body
Fitness professionals and enthusiasts are well aware that recovery is the key to enjoying the benefits of exercise. My question is, do professionals know how much recovery is needed to actually allow the body to compensate from the damage it has just been exposed to? How can you confidently know that the body is ready for another training session, be it intense or moderate? Of course, general feeling can be a useful barometer for knowing whether you're ready to slog it out again but the truth is, it's the nervous system that should be listened to in order to discover recovery time.
The two arms of the autonomic nervous system; sympathetic and parasympathetic. In simple terms, the sympathetic is like the accelerator pedal in your car, speeding up your body, internal systems and function; whereas your parasympathetic is like your brake pedal, slowing things down.
At any one time, they are both in operation providing balance and maintaining healthy function. Exercise generally arrives in conjunction with the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and the PNS allows us to fully recover. However, do we accurately know when this has occurred or is it guess work?
Many athletes tune into their resting heart rate as an indicative measure of recovery on the notion that a return to a normal resting heart rate represents recovery. Sounds simple enough right? Well, unfortunately not. Sympathetic overload (i.e. overtraining) can be identified by a lowering in resting heart rate which may appear initially as a positive adaptation to exercise.
Another way in which athletes tend to manage recovery is by their planning. Typically having a light training day or a total rest day after a heavy or intense session. Is this enough? Whilst theoretically it makes sense, the body's response to training isn't always predictable. Sometimes the nervous system takes longer to recover from varying degrees of overreaching in training, not even considering muscular recovery.
My point is, periodisation of training programmes isn't enough. Careful and continual monitoring of training responses is absolutely necessary to allow the body sufficient time to recover. There are more accurate and simple methods of monitoring responses so that you as trainers and clients are able to be more selective about when to train. We're looking forward to launching our advanced fitness testing course in 2012 which covers much more on this.
The two arms of the autonomic nervous system; sympathetic and parasympathetic. In simple terms, the sympathetic is like the accelerator pedal in your car, speeding up your body, internal systems and function; whereas your parasympathetic is like your brake pedal, slowing things down.
At any one time, they are both in operation providing balance and maintaining healthy function. Exercise generally arrives in conjunction with the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and the PNS allows us to fully recover. However, do we accurately know when this has occurred or is it guess work?
Many athletes tune into their resting heart rate as an indicative measure of recovery on the notion that a return to a normal resting heart rate represents recovery. Sounds simple enough right? Well, unfortunately not. Sympathetic overload (i.e. overtraining) can be identified by a lowering in resting heart rate which may appear initially as a positive adaptation to exercise.
Another way in which athletes tend to manage recovery is by their planning. Typically having a light training day or a total rest day after a heavy or intense session. Is this enough? Whilst theoretically it makes sense, the body's response to training isn't always predictable. Sometimes the nervous system takes longer to recover from varying degrees of overreaching in training, not even considering muscular recovery.
My point is, periodisation of training programmes isn't enough. Careful and continual monitoring of training responses is absolutely necessary to allow the body sufficient time to recover. There are more accurate and simple methods of monitoring responses so that you as trainers and clients are able to be more selective about when to train. We're looking forward to launching our advanced fitness testing course in 2012 which covers much more on this.
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