Recovery after training: where the progress is actually made

Training is a stimulus, recovery is the response

A session does not make you fitter on the day. It disturbs the body, and the adaptation happens in the hours and days afterwards. Strength, endurance and the ability to tolerate stress all rise during that window, provided it is long enough and the conditions are right.

The 2013 consensus statement on overtraining describes three stages. Functional overreaching is a planned or accidental short-term drop in performance after hard training, which turns into a gain after recovery. Non-functional overreaching lasts longer and gives no gain. Overtraining syndrome is the far end: months of underperformance and fatigue. The difference between the last two is hard to see, and overtraining can only be diagnosed by ruling out other causes.

For most executives the risk is not overtraining in the athletic sense. It is the combination of a moderate training load with a heavy professional one, short nights and frequent travel. The body does not keep separate accounts for the gym and the office.

Sleep comes first

Nothing else in recovery comes close. The consensus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society sets the adult need at 7 hours or more on a regular basis, and notes that more than 9 may be appropriate for someone recovering from sleep debt.

The cost of falling short is easy to underestimate. In a laboratory study by Van Dongen and colleagues, people restricted to 6 hours or less a night built up deficits in attention equivalent to up to two nights without sleep, and they barely noticed it. That is exactly the situation of a busy quarter: a performance loss that feels normal.

Two practical consequences follow.

• After a short night, lower the session, do not cancel it. Keep the movements and cut the load or the intervals.
• After several short nights, protect sleep before adding training. An extra session will not compensate for a missing hour in bed.

For the habits that make the nights longer, see sleep for executives.

Easy weeks and lighter blocks

Many coaches plan a lighter week every few weeks, cutting volume or load while keeping the movements. This is a reasonable application of the overload-and-recovery principle. It is not, however, a schedule backed by trials: no position stand that we could verify prescribes how often or how much to reduce. Treat it as a coaching practice.

A simpler rule works for people whose calendar already imposes variation. When a week brings a board meeting, two flights and a closing, make it the light week. Keep the sessions short, keep the technique, and resume the progression the following week. The ACSM's own guidance on progression, adding 2 to 10% of load only once you can do one or two repetitions more than the target, already builds in caution.

Reading your morning pulse

A resting heart rate taken on waking, compared with your own seven-day average, is the simplest daily check. A detailed method for taking it is in resting heart rate; here the question is what to do with it.

A 2014 review by Buchheit concluded that short, near-daily resting measurements are among the most useful monitoring tools available, provided changes are read against the measurement's own noise and the smallest change that matters. The calculator above uses two practical thresholds, 4 and 7 beats above baseline. They are conventions to prompt attention, not validated cut-offs.

A raised pulse has many causes besides training: a short night, alcohol, heat, dehydration, a long flight, an infection starting. That is why the same review stresses that heart rate cannot tell you everything about fatigue. Combine it with two questions: how did I sleep, and how heavy do my legs feel on the stairs?

What heart rate variability can and cannot say

Wearables now report heart rate variability, the variation in time between beats, and many turn it into a recovery score. The standards for measuring it were set by a European and North American task force in 1996. The interpretation is less settled.

A 2013 review by Plews and colleagues found that in elite athletes both rises and falls in variability have been linked to poor adaptation. The authors concluded that the measure only makes sense as a long personal series, averaged over several days. In practice, follow the weekly trend against your own history, and do not let a single morning's score decide the session. We found no validation of commercial recovery scores that we could verify.

Fitness also speeds recovery from work stress

Training is not only something to recover from. A 2006 meta-analysis by Forcier and colleagues found that fitter people showed a faster return of heart rate to normal after psychological stress. The link with exercise and stress runs both ways: a sound training habit helps you recover from a hard day, and a hard day reduces what you can absorb from training. How to adjust sessions in the heaviest weeks is covered in mental load and training.

When fatigue is not about training

Most tiredness in a demanding job is explained by sleep, travel and workload. Some is not. The 2013 consensus lists causes that must be ruled out before blaming training: infections, illness, too little food, too little carbohydrate or protein, and iron or magnesium deficiency. No single blood test or questionnaire can confirm overtraining.

See a doctor if your resting heart rate stays unusually high or low, if you have palpitations or fainting, or if performance keeps falling with fatigue that lasts more than a couple of weeks despite rest.

A coach who sees your sleep and your calendar can adjust the load before fatigue builds up. If that would help, you can open your Club space and share both with them.