RECOVERY & REGENERATION: The Forgotten Fifty-Percent of High Performance Training

It is important for young athletes to realize at an early age that "balance" in their lives is critical to their emotional, mental and physical growth. Training like collegiate or professional athletes should not be something they should replace their "youthful play" years with!

It is far more important to learn to eat a well balanced diet, avoid "fast foods", get the right amount of sleep nightly and engage in as many various types of sports and physical activities as they can. 

Of the above factors, Sleep is probably is least known PERFORMANCE & GROWTH ENHANCEMENT and, in addition, it is critical to the overall well being and development of all of the bodies organs and systems. So, to the right of this column, under the Specific Topics Column, you can click on Optimizing Performance (second on the list) to read Tim Lathean's fine article on the importance of sleep for adolescents.
For those young athletes who are involved with high school sport programs throughout the school year (and even the Summer now), I would suggest adopting the use of a Training Diary. 

Use a simple Composition Book (200 pages) take a few minutes each day to record vital data that can be of great benefit to alleviating illness, injury, mental and emotional fatigue, over training, lower cognitive abilities, lowering of motivation and drop in performance. Follow the guidelines below and learn to KEEP ALL THINGS IN LIFE IN BALANCE!

Tracking Stress Scores, Sleep and A.M. Resting Heart Rate for boosting academics, mood and athletic abilities.

When students and athletes are happy and in a positive mood state they are more likely to do everything that much better. Happy athletes tend to be stronger/faster and they are stronger/faster for longer periods of time. It’s all because of the Central Nervous System.

The central nervous system is the manager of all other physical systems in the body, and must be considered central to any training plan you undertake. Respiration, excretion, reproduction, digestion and, obviously, the action of our muscles are directly and indirectly affected by the central nervous system either directly or indirectly.

Finding ways to keep the central nervous system stimulated and healthy should be a top priority. Training/Practicing that becomes mundane or tedious, regardless of its merit, becomes a burden to the athlete, destroying motivation and thus growth. It takes a motivated athlete to produce consistent long-term results. The greatest talent still needs the drive to push through season after season. A semi-talented athlete, with only mediocre numbers, can still achieve great success with perseverance and hard work, both qualities empowered by the central nervous system. The greatest challenge is to nurture the motivation, that ignition, as Daniel Coyle points out in “The Talent Code”, that is one part of the trilogy required to succeed. (the other two being Deep Practice and Master Coach)

A system of accounting for the various factors that affect the central nervous system can be an early warning system for you to reduce stress loads to prevent overtraining, fatigue or sickness if used properly.

Doing frequent inventory of your stresses will help you learn to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives. The spark needed from the central nervous system for an athlete to excel can be entirely burned out by any number of the random events that happen in life: anxiety at home, financial stress, work/school worry and all of the other challenges you face on a daily basis.

The Stress Score is a simple way to inventory stress: rate the three major categories of stress each day on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the greatest amount of stress. The three stress categories are Physical, Mental and Emotional. Then rate the three major recovery categories on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most beneficial. The three major recovery categories are Sleep, Rest and Therapy.

Physical stress is work that you do with your muscles, or traumatic stress done to your body. Keep in mind that training/competing is physical work but you may score it higher as it may involve Mental, Emotional AND Physical stresses for some athletes.

Mental stress is cerebral work like studying, doing taxes, creating training programs, writing software and so on. If your job is cerebral, but you really love it and see it as therapeutic, consider yourself very lucky, and fill in the blanks on both the stress side and recovery side.

Emotional stress is not to be confused with mental stress. No work gets done on the emotional column, just lots of energy going down the drain: anger, fear, sadness, worry, anxiety, etc. These are the kinds of things that can do as much damage to a good athlete as a good student.

It’s the recovery side that counteracts stress. Sleep is a critical recovery factor and should be graded in terms of both quality and quantity.

Rest is what you’re doing when you’re not sleeping. Reading, listening to music with your feet up or watching TV is rest.  Gardening, writing a paper, studying or working a part time job (even if no physical labor is required) is not rest/

Therapy is any active aspect that makes you feel better or directly counteracts stress: massage, foam roller, light pool exercise, food/recovery meals, light exercise, things that make you happy and well.

Athletes should consider exercise as therapy. If not, then they are more likely to be outperformed by athletes who exercise therapeutically. You can see that scoring this is very subjective, as it should be! Your central nervous system is unique to you, and only you can score yourself accurately.

Once all categories are filled in, add up the stress and recovery totals. Which side is larger? What are your trends? What are you going to do about it? It’s good to know if you’re writing checks with your body that your central nervous system can’t cover. If the stress side of your equation is chronically overwhelming the recovery side, then you need to analyze the deficit and fix it. In essence, you need to stop bouncing checks.

To extend that financial metaphor, balance stress and recovery blocks like a bank statement. Stress accumulated through a work block should be systematically eliminated in a rest block. Don’t start the next training block while still tired or stressed. As intangible as stress is, it has a very tangible effect on energy levels and power output levels. The Stress Score should help you systematically manage your central nervous system.

Be aware that your success is not random and that your ability to train long and hard for a long time depends on how happy you are doing it. Be happy and you’ll train/practice for a longer period of time and have a better time doing it. All training programs are 50% recovery/ regeneration.

How much sleep you are getting each night is just as important as how much practice /training time you spend each day.

Daily morning pulse checks can be a way of getting an advanced warning signal that you are not recovered, on the verge of being sick or being over-trained.

Recording daily morning pulse checks and hours of sleep along with your Stress Score can be a great way to “take control” of your training, studying and emotional stability. It only takes about 4-5 minutes each day to insure you are on the right track.