We All Know The Importance Of Recovery For Athletes Who Want To Perform. But The Question Is, Do You Actually Follow A Strategy That Works?

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

Authors Note: This blog is best accompanied with our KVLR™ Recovery System Handbook. Click here to download this resource.

Performance = Fitness – Fatigue

You know that the notion of an athlete’s recovery is serious business when ‘Recovery Centres’ are popping up like Movie Rental stores after the birth of the DVD.

Recovery is all the rage and it’s become a huge consideration amongst coaches, researchers, athletes, and allied health practitioners. 

And for good reason.

The old adage of ‘go hard or go home’ is all well and good, but, if the home (aka anything that isn’t training), isn’t conducive to rest and repair, there is only so long you can keep ‘going hard for.’

But what exactly is, recovery?

It’s one of those words that is used a lot, but rarely is it defined in a way that captures everything it means. So what is the right way to look at recovery? Recovery has many definitions, but for the purposes of you understanding the full story, consider this definition from Kellmann and Kallus:

“ The inter- and intra-individual multi-level process in time for the re-establishment of performance abilities.”

Kellmann and Kallus

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

What the?

If you feel more confused now than you did five seconds ago, we don’t blame you… literature articles don’t always use the most appealing terminology. So let’s take that definition, and simplify it.

Kentta and Hassmen have called the state of stress/fatigue (exactly what ‘recovery strategies’ are trying to get you out of), as a:

“psycho-social-physiological phenomenon”.

Kentta & Hassmen

That’s important to know, because that’s exactly what Kellman and Kallus were referring to when they said: “The inter- and intra-individual multi-process.”

Thought of simply:

Recovery is the return of the system (in this case, our body) to full function, but, that system is made up of many parts, that all interact with each other in a unique and unpredictable ways.

It encompasses many things — it is your neural (central nervous system) recovery, your muscular (microtrauma of the tissue and presence of free hydrogen ions) recovery, your substrate recovery (aka glucose, protein, electrolytes and, water), and your psychological (mental) recovery.

Given how extensive it is, and how little planning usually goes into it, it is no surprise that bodies break down and physiotherapists are never without beaten, battered, and broken clients to treat and fix.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

And That Brings Us To The Truth About Recovery…

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

The time devoted to the planning of training is usually so disproportionate to the time spent planning, that it’s almost guaranteed you aren’t doing enough.

Just let that sink in.

Given that we know that Performance = Fitness (your training) – fatigue (your current state and condition), you’re likely to only be actively influencing one of the factors that dictate your performance.

Which means you could be leaving extensive gains on the table.

Which brings us to our second home-hitting truth — you have to start thinking about recovery as a training day, not as something that ‘just happens.’

And that’s where we divert from most resources on recovery.

Stephen Bird, from Charles Sturt University, pioneered the discussion on recovery strategies, developing the 100-point weekly recovery checklist that acts as an education tool as well as helping athletes have a measurable recovery target to shoot for.

It’s a great resource and we’ve used it extensively, BUT, we’ve also put our own little ‘tweak’ or ’switch in thinking’ that makes it a higher priority.

This little switch takes recovery from being something ’that I might get around to’ to something that ‘I always do.’

And in the world of athlete development, compliance is the aim of the game.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

So What’s The Tweak?

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

Instead of thinking about recovery as a ‘weekly checklist of collecting 100 points’, we have turned recovery into a Training Day. If you’re wondering why we’d change a 100-point weekly recovery checklist if it’s already working, well, that’s because while it does work some of the time, thinking about recovery over the course of the week leaves you open to missing out critical, non-negotiables that are time-dependent; sometimes it matters when you do something, not just IF you do something. However, the core premise is sound, so we’ve made a few tweaks, adding a few elements, and made the system more complete.

Your regeneration day is a dynamic training session, broken into three parts, that initiates the moment your event finishes, through to the moment your head hits the pillow, and, for the 24 hours that follow.

During your Regeneration Day, your job is to engage in a combination of the most well-researched recovery strategies, combining the best elements of a step-by-step system and the best elements of a points system. Rather than feeling like we had to choose one or the other (structure vs flexibility), we chose both in a three-phase system: Do this, then do that, then do any of these.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

Replacing Lost Water Weight Is Critical Recovery & Easy Money In The Bank

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

Hydration doesn’t end once you finish. That’s when it starts.

Most athletes would be familiar with the importance of staying hydrated during exercise — it happens to be critical to maintaining peak performance. But, what is less well known, is that it’s just as important after it, too.

Having a water consumption target post-event will fast-track the recovery of your heart rate, reduce fatigue, improve digestion, and accelerate muscle repair.

It’s easy to do but rarely given enough attention to. A big mistake for an athlete wanting to work on the 1%’ers.

Our target is to replace 1.5x the BW loss after your event with the water, along with a 2:1 ratio of simple, easily digestible carbohydrates and protein. While actual quantities will vary, an initial target to shoot for would be .75 – 1x your BW/kg in carbohydrate and .35 x your BW/kg in protein. Speak to a sports dietician to get more individualised targets which take the whole picture into consideration; this is only a guide.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

The Case For Sleep: Why A Good Night’s Rest Is The Cheapest, Easiest & Most Underutilised Tool In Your Recovery Arsenal

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

It’s amazing how many athletes pay $70 to get a massage after getting 6 hours night sleep the night after a big event.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

The case for sleep as it impacts the stress/fatigue state is probably the area that has reached the highest level of consensus amongst experts, practitioners, coaches, and athletes.

Sleep after an intense competition event is the golden egg.

It is the single activity that will trigger a tsunami of effects that begin to restore balance across all those different factors we discussed earlier — the recovery of the nervous, muscular, substrate, and psychological systems.

But for some athletes, sleeping doesn’t come easily. Whether you can’t sleep because you’re too wired after a nighttime game, or you have young kids that keep you up, or, you have work early the next day, there are many reasons why an athlete might not get 9 hours a night. Having that arbitrary target doesn’t make sense, and sets our athletes up for failure.

Rather, we break it up into what we can control, and what we can’t.

In our recovery system, you get points as long as you control what you can control — and that is what we call your sleep hygiene. In the same way you can’t control if you need your wisdom teeth taken out, you can control if you brush them, and that’s the difference.

For an athlete exposed to regular and extensive levels of exercise, a greater effort needs to be placed on their sleep hygiene. Amongst other things, a dark room that blocks natural light, the removal of blue light from your devices or wearing blue-light glasses, and ensuring you adequately wind down with low-stimulation activities before (so skip the horror show). We’ve put your full sleep hygiene protocol as part of your free download, so don’t be concerned about having to do research, it’s all here for you.

Even if you don’t sleep 9 hours, you’ll still be rewarded for making the effort to put your best foot forward. If you do end up sleeping tearfully for 9 hours, that’s a bonus, and you get extra points for that. For those who are research inclined, there is a lot of detailed information on sleep hygiene and it impacts on performance recovery, click this link if you want something to sink your teeth into.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

Your Regeneration ‘Training Day’

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

After you’ve completed the non-negotiables — your sleep hygiene and rehydration — it’s critical to maximize flexibility for the day after a big competition event. Depending on your lifestyle, you may have nothing on, or, you may have a lot on — thankfully your regeneration training day accommodates every lifestyle. Someone who has to go to work for 9 hours that day can just as easily complete this as someone who has the whole day off to sit on their back porch and read.

Remember how we mentioned how recovery was multi-faceted, and it included things like psychological, substrate as well as the more typical, muscular recovery?

We tick off every element and it can all be done in less than 30 minutes.

In our eyes, one of the more optimal strategies is to include strategies from different modalities — one or two that promote blood flow, one or two that promote substrate recovery, and one or two that promote a psychological recovery. This is all laid out in our KVLR Recovery System, which you can download for free here.

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

So We’re Guessing You Want To Know What Your Regeneration Day Looks Like?

How Athletes Improve Their Recovery With The 100-Point Athlete Recovery Checklist

As we mentioned, flexibility within constraints is important if the goal is to actually maximise recovery. For that reason, rather than mapping out an exact, non-negotiable protocol, we’ve given you a framework for optimising recovery while maximising flexibility.

We’ve put together your step-by-step Performance Recovery System PDF which you can download here.

Your Free PDF Download includes:

The complete guide to setting up a sleep hygiene routine that sets you up for success, even if you have struggled to fall asleep in the past.

A comprehensive list of all your different recovery options that ensure you achieve substrate, muscular AND a psychological recovery from your game.

Two guided meditations you can’t find on YouTube to load into your phone that help you achieve greater muscle relaxation before bed, using well-researched strategies known as PMR and Autogenic Relaxation.

The secret ingredient of our Recovery System – your self-reflection journaling template that helps identify your areas of opportunity, reframe your performance as positive and completely let go.

Our Recovery System is easy to follow and includes everything you need to maximise your recovery. It also includes the ‘secret ingredient’ you’re missing that in a poll of 100 amateur and emerging athletes we asked, only three reported ‘regularly doing it.’

Click this link and get immediate access, it’ll be a game-changer.

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