Learn to Recover

 

It’s About More Than Just Resting and Recuperating

     In my last essay on “Plateau Busters,” I mentioned briefly the importance of proper recovery when your progress has stalled.  But recovery is important all the time.  If you do it “right,” then you won’t have too much stalled progress in the first place.

     Part of the issue with recovery methods, at least in the West, is that too much emphasis on training is placed around volume, intensity, and “rest and recuperation.”  The prevailing understanding for most lifters—and I don’t want to generalize, but I believe this to be true—is that recovery will take care of itself if you train hard and then give your body plenty of time to “rest and grow.”  While that has some truth to it, I won’t deny, it’s not the whole picture.  Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.

     I wish lifters would think more along the lines of proper programming.  This certainly includes balancing the variables of volume and intensity, but it also includes balancing frequency.  Of the three training variables—volume, intensity, and frequency—the last one is usually an afterthought.  Lifters will train with a certain amount of volume and intensity based on their preferences or what they believe works best for them—or just what some trainer, who may or may not be decent, tells them to do—and then frequency is simply determined by how long it takes them to recover completely from the volume and intensity they select.

     But proper programming includes more than just the three training variables.  In Eastern Europe and in Asia—countries whose “average” trainees are influenced much more by the training of Olympic lifters and other strength athletes than bodybuilders are in the West—the emphasis is more on adaptation, accumulation, and workload.  These factors are generally what I think about when designing a program, and they are the things that I wish more lifters in the West would consider.  But outside of powerlifters and Olympic lifters, this is not usually the lens with which Western lifters see their training.  However, once one centers her training on these factors, and manipulates the 3 training variables within this framework, recovery can then be properly understood, and recovery methods can be used to their full effect.

     Even if you do follow the standard “American system” of less-frequent training, I believe it would be good for you to occasionally do a more frequent routine that borders on overtraining.  It’s (often) only when you are overtraining—or, at least, doing more training than you are accustomed to—that you find the most optimal methods of recovery.

     When I was powerlifting competitively and doing a lot of Russian-style workouts, I stayed sore and tired, but I learned that sore and tired didn’t necessarily mean that I wasn’t improving.  Despite sometimes having to drag myself to my garage gym, my lifts still went up (and up).  But I’m sure that wouldn’t have been the case if my recovery methods weren’t “on point.”

     What follows are a few ideas to help you with recovery.

Cut Out the Superfluous

     When a lot of lifters look over their training journals—and if you don’t keep a training journal, then, please, start—they find that they are doing too many unnecessary things.  If you’re following a split program, do a lot of your exercises for different bodyparts consist of isolation movements, extra “pump” work, or finishers?  You probably don’t need those things.  And you really don’t need them unless you’ve already built large, stout muscles that are in need of “shaping.”

     Strength coach Dan John wrote this one time about this very subject: “I decided to do something singularly unusual: Use my brainpower. I sat down with pen and pad and looked at the waste in my training programs. I noticed I did hours of junk work, including assistance exercises that assisted nothing and long, worthless aerobic sessions. I also noted certain things worked well and took very little time.”*

     Some of this comes down to ensuring that the training you are doing is mirroring the goals you have set for yourself.  If you’re a bench press competitor, then you probably don’t need things like chest flyes, cable crossovers, or pretty much any machine exercise.  They are worthless for increasing your bench press and they cut into your ability to recover from a bench press session and the exercises that you do need to be doing.

     I mentioned earlier about the times I used Russian-style programs while powerlifting.  Sheiko specifically taught me a valuable lesson.  When using a Sheiko program—at least, an “advanced” one—you squat twice per week, deadlift twice per week, and bench press four times per week.  Also, there are a lot of sets of those lifts.  Trust me, you don’t feel like doing much else.  Well, maybe the correct way to put it is that you can’t do much else.  But you don’t need much else.  A few basic exercises done hard, heavy, voluminously, and frequently prevents you from doing all those worthless one-leg whatever movements (or anything similar).

     This is also the beauty of programs such as one-lift-per-day regimens or one-exercise-per-bodypart routines.  All of these workouts cut out the superfluous and allow you to focus on recovery, or perhaps a better way to put it is that they force you to focus on recovery.

Add in Loaded Carries

     One of the best ways to achieve your training goals is to get on a training program that is centered on compound exercises.  You know, the basics.  I prefer full-body workouts for the vast majority of trainees or two-way split programs if not full-body.  However, I think there are some benefits to implementing extra workouts, especially when those extra sessions are not the traditional gym exercises but are, rather, loaded carries, dragging movements, or other “odd” lifts.

     The benefit of these movements—farmer walks, stone carries, sled drags, wheelbarrow carries, etc.—and one of the reasons that they help so much with recovery is often overlooked.  You don’t have any “negative” or eccentric portion to these movements, or very little.  Standard gym exercises often cause a lot of soreness because of the eccentric portion of the lift.  But if you can find a lift that still induces blood flow, causes a “pump” in the muscles worked, but doesn’t have an eccentric portion, you are able to not only work the muscle without inducing soreness but are also able to allow the muscles worked to recover faster.  In fact, doing a few sets of sled drags the day after a squat workout or some sandbag carries the day after a heavy back session will actually allow you to recover faster than if you didn’t do anything at all!

Do Some Light Workouts

     Along the same lines as loaded carries, doing some light workouts after heavier ones can “teach” your body to recover faster than simply sitting on your butt and waiting for your muscles to recover.

     The prevailing, and largely American, idea that you should train a muscle hard and then not train it again until you are no longer sore—and this often includes waiting another day or two after soreness has abated before training it—means that very few modern trainees ever condition their bodies to handle more and more work.  You can recover quicker than you probably believe, but you have to condition your body to do so.  And that will never happen if you wait a week between training sessions for a lift or bodypart.

     No matter the training program that you are on, the easiest way to condition yourself to recover faster is through the use of light workouts.  Just make sure that your light workouts are actually light workouts.  And the best way to ensure this is to track your total workload at each training session.  Many lifters will do a “light” workout after a heavy workout, only to discover that their workload is significantly higher on the “light” day.  If you are training with half the weight of your heavy day but with high reps and intensity techniques, the chances are that your light day is actually significantly heavier than your heavy day.

     Let’s say that you have been training your chest once per week, on Monday, with high-volume, high-intensity training.  Then do your standard Monday workout, but then on Thursday, even if you’re sore, return to the gym and do a workout with about half the sets and half the weight utilized but keep your reps the same as your Monday session.  You may find that, by doing this, you are noticeably less sore on Friday, or at least Saturday, than you typically are by doing no light workout whatsoever.

In Summary

     A lot of what I have covered here are not the “typical” recommendations revolving around recovery.  I realize that I haven’t discussed dietary habits, recovery “techniques” such as massage or ice baths (or anything similar), or sleeping habits—the stuff I touched upon in my “Plateau Busters” article.  But if you’ll look around this blog, or just make some cursory searches on the internet, you will find plenty of essays, talks, articles, or videos that have that stuff covered.  Instead, I simply wanted to discuss some of the things that lifters often don’t give enough credence  to.  If you’ll put some of these ideas into practice, along with ensuring that you do get enough sleep and rest between workouts, you may find that recovery is a lot easier than you thought—not to mention the fact that your muscle growth and strength might just skyrocket.

 

 

 

*John, Dan. Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning (p. 262). On Target Publications. Kindle Edition.

 

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