Deregulation
Most of the focus concerning training is on the stress of the work performed. Exercises, sets and reps, and the ever-contentious intensity vs volume become the point of interest and argument. When in reality, the training is merely the stimulus from which your body makes the improved adaptations, but only when punctuated with rest. You need the stress, but more so you need the recovery, and recovery — like anything — is a practice.
The majority of trainees just wait for time to do its thing. Completing grueling training sessions that are overly focused on complex rep/set structures or theoretical biometrics, and then waiting 24 hours to repeat the process. It is rarely progressive, hardly intuitive, and mostly counterproductive. There is something to be said about the amount of progress someone can make by merely improving their ability to recover. Here is a starting list of practices and considerations that will help convert your hard work into real performance.
Breath First
The first and foremost rule — in sequence not importance — is to change your state as soon as you can following training. Training is sympathetic, it is fight or flight, stress that signals specific pathways. Recovery is parasympathetic, rest and digest, a state that is required to facilitate the demands of those open channels. Your body must be in the proper state to start the reparation process. If the body is still in a heightened alarm state due to intense training, it cannot properly facilitate healing and repair. Imagine trying to get restful sleep while an alarm blares, the same can be said for trying to suck down nutrients when the system is still revved up from the stress. Not properly down-regulating after a training session disrupts your body’s natural desire to be at rest and repair. Our breathing patterns dictate a large portion of this state.
Following an especially grueling or intense session, you should immediately start down-regulating your system by getting it to return to neutral. We do this by way of off-gassing or changing the ratio of CO2 and Oxygen. Some methods to do this include alternating sharp exhales and deep inhales with long ventilation exhales (10 seconds or so depending on your ability). Do this until you can easily sustain a 4-4-4-4 box breath (that’s 4 seconds of each: inhale, retention, exhale, suspension). If you are feeling panic at any point, back up, and purge CO2 by doing sharp exhales and long or extended ventilating exhales, or use a progressive box breathing pattern like 2-2-2-2 and then 3-3-3-3. Do this until the 4-second box breath causes no panic.
This practice should take no longer than 5-10 minutes, quicker if you are skilled in recovery or have experience managing or regulating your state using breath. It is a vital practice especially if you train later in the day or evening as training can adversely affect sleep. It can be included in a “cool-down” and we often teach it while continuing to move on a bike or walking on a treadmill. What it opens up is an entire world of awareness. Because regulating your state via breath can be used throughout the day. Spending five minutes post-training to focus on it can drastically change the amount of recovery you can get, and the practice often opens the player’s awareness to breathing patterns while training (a topic that could be its own article) To mitigate minor and major stressors, breath work is a priceless tool.
Hydrate, then Eat
People know about recovery meals. Hell, most of us might train just in order to eat a little more loosely. But one thing that gets overlooked is hydration and its role in the recovery process. The short answer is that you should replace water and minerals first and foremost before other calories because a properly hydrated system can shuttle glycogen more effectively. This isn’t always just a loss of sodium, so one should ensure a balanced electrolyte mix gets put in very close to the completion of hard or long efforts.
Eating then is fairly simple, you need carbs and protein, and to minimize fat for the time being so that digestion is quick. There has been some speculation on whether the introduction of carbs keeps you sympathetic, but even if that is true, the other processes for replacing amino acids to ensure protein synthesis are far more important than an anomalous increased measurement of the sympathetic nervous system. This is probably a good time to point out just how wrong the general public is with this protocol and how the marketing of protein shakes has negatively affected the perception of recovery; as most people have learned to consume protein after exercise. The truth is that protein needs to be digested and in the system before the breakdown of tissue if it is going to positively influence recovery. This means protein before an effort is crucial — that is —if you are actually training. This rule does not matter much if what you are doing at the gym can’t be considered a true training signal (which is also common). It is most likely why a lack of efficacy in the general population hasn’t been noticed, they don’t work hard enough to need recovery. We cover this in our Capacity and Strength Manuals and mention it at least once a month in The Space Program. After training, carbs are a priority, protein is a passenger. Use 3:1 or 4:1 and you’ll likely have it right.
Move
Aside from very specific elite sports where every ounce of energy and attention goes into training, you need to move — a lot. Our general recommendation is walking between 8000 and 13000 steps between training sessions. We practice 200 steps for every rep over 70% and 100 steps for every 10 reps under as a general guide for weightlifting. Or you can add 100 steps for every minute of exercise. High daily averages are correlated to very healthy outcomes, between 10-20k steps seems to be a generic goal that is easy to apply for the general population. Walking is a mechanical flushing. It is an ingenious system whereby your “plumbing” is connected to your locomotion. When your average daily mileage goes up, so does your recovery because locomotion settles the psyche — affecting mood, hormones, soreness, and sleep positively. The therapeutic technique of EMDR hijacks this very mechanism. As the eyes track laterally from left to right as they might when walking on a trail, the brain is looking for possible danger. The tracking itself and forward movement is a subconscious signal that “everything is fine.” As the system relaxes and the lymphatic system is activated, not only the physical but the psychological parts of the system go into recovery.
Everyone has excuses not to do it. We work desk jobs, we commute to work, etc, etc. It doesn’t really matter, if you want to make profound changes, walking is probably the most potent tool in which to do it. For the average person, walking is more effective than training at improving overall well-being, health, and longevity. So take the time that you might normally spend complaining about how it isn’t possible to walk more and… walk more.
Rest
I’m not talking about what most people do at night, which is to lie down and become unconscious. I’m talking about the intentional practice of rest. This takes into consideration what you need to do—personally—in order to get restorative rest. For very active people, good old-fashioned sleep, in plentiful quantity and quality provides enough restoration to help us tolerate the insults of daily life. But for inactive and sedentary people, moving more might actually be more restful than trying to sleep more (refer to the above paragraph for recommendations). In fact, many sedentary people complain of insomnia, even though their mind is overworked and overstimulated, their body has not had enough activity to find comfort in stillness and eventual rest. High-intensity exercise or strong stimuli in training is usually not the answer. An analogy that might be helpful is imagining a 40-year-old car that is mostly stored and does not have regular maintenance. To “keep it going’ you just start it and do a burnout for 15 minutes every few days. How long would it take before things start to break down?
Sleep
Some simple rules for sleep hygiene:
1-Dim the lights and avoid phones and computers an hour before bed. Not just the light but the alarm feeling of new emails and messages can jump-start the nervous system.
2-Get it dark. Melatonin is activated through your skin so you need more than to just cover your eyes. Tape over LEDs and invest in some blackout curtains.
3-Swap TV for reading books and white noise. This may seem obvious but most entertainment is predicated on affecting your fear centers, perhaps not the best choice for getting peaceful rest.
4-Moving air, like a fan on low, can help regulate temperature and alleviate some symptoms of sleep apnea.
5-Get the temperature right, “warm feet, cool head” is the ancient wisdom.
These are basic and very effective methods. Despite the advertising for new expensive mattresses and technological innovations, most people can improve their sleep by simply preparing for sleep and not letting their work day run into their private time. If you have a sleep tracker, spend one week experimenting with the above strategies, and then the next laying in bed reading comments on political topics with action movies blaring in the back. The data should reveal what is more conducive and you won’t have to take my word for it.
Some supplements can help but they have mixed reviews and one should avoid dependency on them. Many people falsely believe alcohol helps them sleep but there is plenty of data showing the opposite, especially with downgrading in growth hormone secretion and causing a ruckus with testosterone. THC/CBD is a more recent and popular substance to enhance sleep. If you have trouble falling asleep, it can be helpful to start the process but it does NOT improve sleep quality, and some studies suggest it deters states of deep sleep. Think of it like a crutch, helpful if you are getting no sleep, but it will atrophy your natural ability to fall and stay asleep. More often than not, it helps mask deficient behaviors and slowly degrades sleep quality. Supplemental melatonin is wildly irregular, with no standard potency, and rarely has consistent results. Natural herbal teas have some reported benefit but it is likely the intention and process is more effective than the substance itself. Pulling supplements is likely more helpful than adding more. Stimulants on top of a hectic life do no favors to poor sleep. Cut caffeine after 12 p.m., and try to get training in before 5 p.m. Seriously question medications and double-check contraindications. The medical profession is bought into and reinforced by insanely poor sleep habits, it is hard to take current and common advice without scrutiny.
Types of sleepers vary, some people need to wait until they are utterly exhausted to get into bed. Others, need to get into bed before they are tired in order to get restful sleep. Most people will know which type they are, but a lot of us have bad habits from childhood; even in my 40s, I feel like I am still rebelling against my bedtime. Luckily, this is counteracted by my circadian rhythm and reinforced by a sensitivity to what “feels” right. Give yourself a week to wake up without an alarm, whatever the average time of sleep is is what you should plan for on a daily basis and reverse engineer your bedtime. Do everything you can to wake up naturally and only use an alarm as the exception. Sadly, many of us use our time away from work to further exacerbate our sleeping habits (weekends, vacations, etc.), but using your time to tune your rest cycles can pay dividends.
No matter what type of lifestyle you have, it is rare that we are taught to manipulate eating, breathing, and sleep to counterbalance periods of extreme stress, including increases in training but also the combination of life stress and training, which the body does not discriminate between. We are naturally driven to eat more when we are overworked and sleep-deprived, and less of that nutrition is available to us in highly fatigued states because we are more likely to be in a chronic sympathetic state (digestion works poorly). Most people’s lifestyles have them dealing with one crisis to the next. Sitting in traffic, late to work, ramped up on caffeine and sugar may not seem like the world is going to end, but the signaling to our body is slightly different than our conscious experience. The signal of being late triggers deep alarm bells of anxiety and fear, traveling in a metal box at 80mph to your subconscious feels like an extreme sport, and the daily chemical concoction sets you up like you are fueling for war every single day. Add in lack of sunlight, movement, and nutrient-dense meals — compounded with too little sleep — and you have… well, what you have is our modern era, where the majority of people are quite dysfunctional.
Most people know they need to add exercise, and the educated usually try to make it training (purposeful), but it is often not an antidote like it is sold. More often than not, intense training exacerbates an already over-stimulated system. Unfortunately, our culture pushes a narrative that you need to work harder, wake up early, and hustle endlessly, but none of those strategies are effective if you are already not tolerating the workload and stress that you have. Add more intentional and conscious recovery. Once you feel better, then you can wake up at 4:30 am and strangle a wolf or whatever.
