Everyone who does any physical training should know the importance of rest. Many of us however get too tied up in the actual training and forget about the rest component.<\/p>\n
The who idea behind super-compensation training is that you stress your body during hard training bouts, damage muscle tissue and such like and then during the rest periods your body responds by repairing the damage and actually improving the capacity of your muscles, heart and lungs to do such work, thereby improving your performance. The real improvements are therefore only realised during the rest periods, without them there would be little improvement and soon fatigue and injury would set in.<\/p>\n
For those if us who enjoy running, biking, swimming, weights etc. it is however difficult to take days off, the feeling we get from training just drives us on to do more an more and we often ignore the all importnat rest component. I’ve recently been trying to be a little more disciplined with the rest side of things.<\/p>\n
Now, rest doesn’t have to be complete and utter rest, in fact certain studies show that active recovery may be more beneficial. This means that doing a very easy training session is actually better than doing nothing at all, as long as it really is VERY easy. I still find it useful to have at east one day off completely now and then, especially if there are any aches and pains or niggles in problem areas.<\/p>\n
I have been finding that an easy spin on the turbo trainer does indeed seem to work wonders. I feel good\u00a0because\u00a0I have at least done something but I’ve also allowed my body a bit of time to recover before it’s next hard effort. These recovery rides normally last between 30 minutes and an hour and are comprised of lots of high cadence spinning at low resistances. In general my heart rate stays in the 100-130 bpm range (Zone 1-2 for me). There’s little stress on my body, it’s a great workout for fat burning and I feel refreshed and ready for my next hard workout.<\/p>\n
Here’s one I did yesterday, a day after a hard interval session on the bike –\u00a0Admittedly\u00a0I did do an hour of hard circuit training and an hour swim training later in the day, but the recovery ride help keeps my legs turning\u00a0without\u00a0placing too much stress on my body.<\/p>\n