Recovery has the biggest effect on your training. You have a training plan, and you stick to it. Your diet is spot on.
But what about your recovery?
What’s the point of training hard day in and day out if you don’t have a recovery plan in place?
There could be a variety of things that will slow your progress when it comes to recovery.
Sleep, over-training, meal timings, and food quality all have an impact.
Sleep will give you the biggest return, aim for 7-8 hours of quality sleep.
Less than this and you may feel tired before the day is done.
If you train more than once a day you will likely need more than 8 hours, though this could be hard.
A nap during the day will help, but most people are not able to due to family/work commitments.
Avoid any computer/laptop/tablet/phone at least an hour before bed.
Caffeine should be avoided at least 5 hours before you want to sleep.
Overtraining is easily done.
You may feel fine to train twice a day at the start or even to do a larger 120-minute session.
But it will catch up with you in the end, either you will feel burnt out or you will injure yourself.
How do you know if you are overtraining?
If you find that you have 2 or more of the below issues, you should probably have a look at what you are doing.
Workouts seem harder than normal, you have a niggling injury that won’t go away, you feel tired all the time, you’re grumpy and don’t know why and you stop feeling hungry.
The same amount of time that you put into planning your workouts and nutrition should be put into planning your recovery.
Proper training, proper nutrition, and proper recovery are the keys to success.
