Active Recovery
A positive renewal
I’m sure you often hear people in our world talking about ‘active recovery’. What is it and when does it apply? What’s the theory and science behind it? What are the opportunities to use it as a tool in your endurance toolset?
Active recovery is simply what it sounds like. It is being active while recovering from a physical effort. The opposite is inactive recovery which means not doing anything while you recover.
Why do you care? Because there is theory that says you will recover faster with active recovery and there are other positive advantages to doing so.
Let’s take the first, most common example. You race a hard event and in the hours, days after the event you recover. For sake of argument let’s say you run a marathon on a Sunday. What do you do to recover on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday etc?
The theory of active recovery says that you will recover faster if you do something with your legs to get the blood flowing through the muscles. The science says that the increased blood flow will flush out accumulated lactic acid faster than if you just sat around. We refer to this as ‘flushing the junk out’. The theory is that getting the junk out lets your muscles heal faster and you recover faster.
It is my experience that you will recover faster from an event if you remain active during the initial recover days following the event. Typically you may give yourself one or two days of complete rest if you are really beat up just to let the swelling go down.
Depending on how you feel you can start some light activity in the third day. Examples of light activity is swimming, easy biking, light running, walking or any other cardio type activity that won’t stress your legs. The rule of thumb here is that you want the initial recovery activity to be at less than 50% effort. You are not training, you are recovering. The muscles are already broken down, you are trying to get blood to them and remind them of what their normal job is.
The studies that have been done used a interval workout as the experiment. They had one group do light recovery jog between the reps and the other just stop. The light recovery group performed better.
This makes perfect sense to me. I know those times when I’ve just sat on the couch after a workout my legs lock up, whereas if I keep moving they don’t.
In general, especially for us older folks, you want to warm up well before any race or hard work out and then warm down the same amount after.
I can’t prove it, but I think that staying active following a race or a hard workout speeds recovery. I don’t agree with the people who advocate extended time off for recovery. I heard someone claim that you should take a day off for every mile of your race. If that was the case I’d never run. I think they are being misinterpreted. I think the sentiment is to take the time off from serious training and instead do active recovery.
I have also found that after a long run it is better to stay active in general than to sit around. If you have a long run on a Saturday morning don’t sit down after you’re done or you may never get up again for the rest of the day. Keep moving, do your chores, do your errands continue to actively live life and your legs will recover normally instead of seizing up.
The second place where active recovery can be used is during a hard workout or race. There will be time in a hard workout and/or in a race where you go too hard and exceed your threshold. Instead of just collapsing your can recover in the event actively. Part of your training is to practice finding that point where you can back off your effort level to and recover enough to pursue the next surge.
Active recovery in a race is something you have to practice in training. What makes this difficult is that your body and brain are telling you to stop and you are probably in a lot of discomfort. Instead of collapsing, if you can keep your legs moving and relax things will shake out after seconds or minutes of braving the discomfort and you can continue racing.
Active recovery is a better strategy than just giving up mid-workout or mid-race, but it takes practice and focus to get through the discomfort phase.
The final thing that you want to consider active recovery for is injury recovery. Staying active can have a positive effect on your healing. For soft tissue injuries like tendonitis or fasciitis low intensity recovery activity can help.
Remember, these are ‘over use’ injuries. As long as you are careful not to stress the injury active recovery is a great part of the healing process. Take enough time off to let any acute swelling or pain heal, but then use light cardio, like you would after a big race, to get blood into the soft tissue so it can heal.
This also enables a normal range of motion while the injury heals. The risk, if you just immobilize the injury, is that it will heal in that static position and create a rigid scar tissue. Then as soon as you try to extend the range of motion that scar tissue tears and you’re back to square one. As an alternative, if you keep the range of motion with light activity, the injury will heal in context of that range of motion.
Again, as long as you’re not doing further damage to the injury, active recovery can make the overall healing process faster, more complete and stronger. The key is light and in many cases non-weight bearing activities that give you the range of motion without the stress.
You also cannot discount the mental value of active recovery. If you are doing something it keeps the continuity of your training intact. If you do nothing it leaves a vacuum for your devious mind to think up alternatives, like eating badly! Active recovery gives you something proactive to focus on during your recovery and that will keep you from going nuts.
In summary active recovery is a useful tool to use in many aspects of your endurance lifestyle. As always you have to fight your inner daemons and balance active recovery with doing too much too soon. Active recovery if deployed correctly can help your training, your racing and, of course, your recovery.