Recovery

There is a lot of discussion about recovery in athletes these days. It's really a big subject, so we'll be brief and only touch on a bit of it. Before we begin, however, here's our bias and it's hardly an attempt to be semantically cute: There are no over-trained athletes, only under-rested ones, as in under-recovered.

The first thing you need to know there are many different forms of recovery. Physical is only one. Another form found in the literature is called cognitive recovery. Webster's defines cognition as "the mental state or faculty of knowing."

Cognitive recovery means a period of adjustment or rest is needed before one leaps from one stressful situation to what quite possibly could turn into another without a period of relaxing separation in between. I wish I had known that before I met my old girl friend. Man, talk about stressors. In the literature this period is known as deactivation. Look, they had to call it something. What this means is we need a time that prevents one stressful situation, say, hard training, from spilling over into another like job, family, future competition or any of the other myraid things that could upset the athlete.

A basic example is a quaterback in football who throws an interception and then spends all his time on the sidelines brooding about it and it affects his performance in the rest of the game. Self-doubt and self-blame can come into play here, feeding on themselves, possibly setting up fears about future performance. Not healthy.

When something unfavorable happens, you can analyze it, figure out what went wrong and work to fix it or you can choose to degrade yourself and, for that matter, any others around you. It's called blame. Blame and growth on the Richter Scale of emotions are diametric opposites.

Athletes spend gobs of time around their coaches and trainers, training hard, being pushed to improve, to get better. It hardly take a leap of the imagination to see that coaches and trainers on a subconscious level can become associated with stressful situations. Think Pavlov here.

In this case the coaches and trainers can become the stressors. So deactivation means a period of separation, a time when the athlete can start another activity. According to the literature, this can be a social activity or something private like watching a movie. Other suggestions include reading or listening to music. The take away message in all of this is the time needs to be spent where the athlete experiences no connection with the stressors, allowing recovery to begin.

Sleep is an important part of cognitive recovery. In our next post, Sleep Matters, we'll talk a bit about one of life's more mysterious states.
j.z. plato