Is Recovery Overvalued In Mordern Training

Safiri

It's a bit of a play on a recent thread here but any question worth thought is a question worth answering. Easy day days easy is a common theme around here but is there a chance we shy away away from the actual training/stress of running and take recovery to the determint of training?

dr.fuzzenstein

You don't actually build muscle during training, but during rest/recovery, that's why it's important.

http://www.2buildmusclefast.com/2011/01/importance-of-rest-and-recovery-in.html?m=1

This seems to be the most accepted theory.
I am no trainer or expert, but this seems to be accepted wisdom.

Just re-read the OP, you mean people take it too easy?
Me, definitely.

ultrapercy

Safiri wrote: »

It's a bit of a play on a recent thread here but any question worth thought is a question worth answering. Easy day days easy is a common theme around here but is there a chance we shy away away from the actual training/stress of running and take recovery to the determint of training?

Yes.Good question.

Safiri

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

You don't actually build muscle during training, but during rest/recovery, that's why it's important.

http://www.2buildmusclefast.com/2011/01/importance-of-rest-and-recovery-in.html?m=1

This seems to be the most accepted theory.
I am no trainer or expert, but this seems to be accepted wisdom.

Just re-read the OP, you mean people take it too easy?
Me, definitely.

Yes kind of. I understand the role of stress/adapt in training and the importance of both roles in progression but tolerance also plays a role would you think?

ultrapercy wrote: »

Yes.Good question.

Thanks UP I think. Could you elaborate further by any chance. For a man who has being involved in the sport as long as and has reached a level of performance that you have, It would be nice to hear your thoughts.

RayCun

"Hard days hard, easy days easy" is only six words. There's not a lot of room for nuance, so there are bound to be a few people who go overboard.

But the basic message is correct, and it's something a lot of runners don't know. For every person going too easy on their easy days there are a dozen who run everything at marathon pace or try to set a new pb on every run, or never run proper hard sessions.

Swashbuckler

Safiri wrote:

It's a bit of a play on a recent thread here but any question worth thought is a question worth answering. Easy day days easy is a common theme around here but is there a chance we shy away away from the actual training/stress of running and take recovery to the determint of training?

Surely it's an individual thing. I see plenty of lads doing a couple of very hard sessions during the week. I don't particularly see much easy stuff. Even their "easy" runs are at a decent clip. They're much faster than me but...... Would that style work for me? Not a chance. If I ran my easy days harder I'd be injured in no time.
So what works for me is two tough sessions and easy miles in between. Easy being easy.
I think there are enough articles and science to back up the fact that there's very little to be gained by running your easy runs harder.

TFBubendorfer

As someone who has just gone through 2 years of recovering from overtraining I can assure you that sufficient recovery is vitally important.

I some ways your question is perfectly valid: most runners don't train hard enough to be in need of much recovery; after all, most runners don't try and race at competitive levels (they still might want to get there one day but that's a different story)

However, being overtrained is not much fun, and can have serious consequences. I was somewhat lucky that I hadn't pushed things too far yet and was still able to eventually recover, though it took close to 2 years. I know one guy who trained himself into serious health issues, and I know another couple of guys who simply can't run properly any more after pushing things too hard.

Itziger

It's a valid question alright but I'm finding that the easy stuff is really important for me and allows me to perform on the 1 or 2 quality sessions per week. I understand the theory that doing sessions on tired legs might have benefits but I tend to err on the side of caution. Maybe it's an age thing. That said, you seem to get a lot of burnout in those US College athletes who train like nutters.
Guess it depends a bit on the distance you're training for too. Any coaches care to opine on that?

adrian522

I would say under valued rather than over valued. Easy days are important so that you can get the most out of your sessions and races. If every run is hard (or faster than a true easy run) then you are going to be tired going into sessions.

For me I find it is better to err on the side of too much recovery rather than too little recovery. I find the sweet spot to be 2 good sessions, 1 long run and 3-4 easy days to keep me in good shape. If I try to add an extra session I find that all the sessions suffer and you are never really fresh going into any of them and as such you don't get as much out of them, though obviously some people can get away with more this is what works for me.

In our club there is a guy who is a 2:3X marathoner who can barely run anymore due to OTS so obviously the dangers of doing too much are there to see. The dangers of doing to little? I'm not sure, maybe you won't progress as fast as you could but you have a lower injury risk and you get the most out of the session that you do.

RayCun

The danger of under-training is under-performance, sure, but also, if you have a week of training like

Monday - 6 miles at 9 minute miles
Tuesday - tempo
Wednesday - 9 miles at 9 minute miles
Thursday - 5 miles at 9 minute miles
Friday - 9 miles at 9 minute miles
Saturday - 6 x 800 @ 5k
Sunday - off

is that a hard week or an easy week? It depends on what the previous week was like, and the week before, and the week before.

Injuries are often caused by spikes in training. A spike is defined by the baseline as much as by the peak, so you could say the problem was one week of over-training, or several preceding weeks of under-training

career move

I think if you're training consistently it's difficult to over value recovery. There's a fine line between maximising training gains and preventing the body from entering a state of under recovery.
There's also a difference between muscular fatigue and central nervous system fatigue. This is a concept popularised by Charlie Francis, Ben Johnson's coach, who developed the high-low system to prevent his runners entering a chronic state of nervous system exhaustion so they alternated high intensity days with low intensity days. Muscles are affected by both high and low intensity training but they usually bounce back quickly, within 24 hours. The CNS is affected by high intensity training. For sprinters that's max or near max sprinting and heavy weightlifting but I'm sure you can extropolate it to distance running as well. It takes 48 - 72 hours for the CNS to recover and it's counter productive to continue high intensity training during this time.

Murph_D

I suppose, as several have already pointed out, recovery is only overvalued if there’s insufficient stress to recover from. If there has been any research to throw into doubt the now conventional wisdom around the stress/recover/adapt cycle I haven’t heard about it. It seems to apply equally to many sports, and several species.

Safiri

RayCun wrote: »

The danger of under-training is under-performance, sure, but also, if you have a week of training like

Monday - 6 miles at 9 minute miles
Tuesday - tempo
Wednesday - 9 miles at 9 minute miles
Thursday - 5 miles at 9 minute miles
Friday - 9 miles at 9 minute miles
Saturday - 6 x 800 @ 5k
Sunday - off

is that a hard week or an easy week? It depends on what the previous week was like, and the week before, and the week before.

Injuries are often caused by spikes in training. A spike is defined by the baseline as much as by the peak, so you could say the problem was one week of over-training, or several preceding weeks of under-training

This is what I was kind of trying to get at but didn't really get across clearly. I didn't mean it in terms of running easy days slowly but more of a complete view on training. It was just something that cropped up in my head while looking at a Steve Magness article on evolution of training. There seems to be a trend over the history of training where certain aspects come into vogue and then start to get overemphasised until the point where the original overall message was lost and training eventually goes in another direction usually completely the opposite of what was intended. High volume short intervals in the 50's and 60's melding into high mileage aerobic focus of the next two decades melding into High intensity intervals of the 90's-early 2000's and on to the low-middling mileage approach that is common now.

Are we overemphasising recovery to the point where we are losing sight with stress? Should someone who is running 3-4 times a week be as concerned about recovery focused training as someone running 7-10 times a week or should they be more concerned about building up more stress tolerance? I've personally never liked the "hard days hard, easy days easy" saying, it might be a good guide for beginner runners but I think it becomes a bit of a moot point beyond that as it's a bit one dimensional as many different effort levels lie in between. It gives the impression also that all workouts should teeth gritting stuff when in reality, that's rarely the case.

RayCun

I think it's still a useful starting point, just like talking about the long slow run is a good starting point, because so many people start running without any sort of coaching and don't know this stuff. And if someone is following a plan from a book or a website that says x days of running with y miles, and one or two specific sessions, they often don't know that the non session days should be easy. Or they don't know that there should be session days.

I was reading a book last week written by a guy who has been running marathons for about twenty years, has run about thirty of them, and is keen enough on running to write a book about it. And he knew _nothing_ about running. When he went for a run, he didn't think about how fast he was running, it was all the one pace. He was running for years before he heard of intervals, and the only intervals he heard of were 300s off a minute. Every marathon he tries to bank 15 minutes in the first half, because he assumes he will lose that much in the second half. I had to stop reading because I wanted to reach into the book and shake him!

So, for someone like that - and there are plenty like that - hard days hard, easy days easy would be a massive improvement in their training.

Safiri

RayCun wrote: »

I think it's still a useful starting point, just like talking about the long slow run is a good starting point, because so many people start running without any sort of coaching and don't know this stuff. And if someone is following a plan from a book or a website that says x days of running with y miles, and one or two specific sessions, they often don't know that the non session days should be easy. Or they don't know that there should be session days.

I was reading a book last week written by a guy who has been running marathons for about twenty years, has run about thirty of them, and is keen enough on running to write a book about it. And he knew _nothing_ about running. When he went for a run, he didn't think about how fast he was running, it was all the one pace. He was running for years before he heard of intervals, and the only intervals he heard of were 300s off a minute. Every marathon he tries to bank 15 minutes in the first half, because he assumes he will lose that much in the second half. I had to stop reading because I wanted to reach into the book and shake him!

So, for someone like that - and there are plenty like that - hard days hard, easy days easy would be a massive improvement in their training.

Fair enough but all training doesn't revolve around those that hammer every run. There's a lot of people gone past that stage where more nuanced discussion may help too. If their understanding of training is as simple as that, they too are falling into another trap as a consequence of that saying if they live by it. You and me and a lot of other people reading this are a bit past those days so I was hoping for a thread that would go a bit farther than that. Benefit/cost would be a better way to look at it for most hoping to gain a better understanding of stress/adapt in my opinion.

RayCun

Safiri wrote: »

Fair enough but all training doesn't revolve around those that hammer every run. There's a lot of people gone past that stage where more nuanced discussion may help too. If their understanding of training is as simple as that, they too are falling into another trap as a consequence of that saying if they live by it. You and me and a lot of other people reading this are a bit past those days so I was hoping for a thread that would go a bit farther than that. Benefit/cost would be a better way to look at it for most hoping to gain a better understanding of stress/adapt in my opinion.

I think the more nuance you want to add, the more specific you have to get.

For example, that training week I posted above. Is it too hard or too easy? Well, it depends on who is doing it. What are their recent race performances? What are their targets, races and times? How long have they been running? What has the progression of their training and their races been like? How much time are they willing/able to spend on training? What is their injury history? How do they feel at the end of each week? After each session?

Without all that, it's hard to know if that runner is working hard enough, too hard, or just right.

In principle, everyone agrees that hard days should be hard and easy days easy, but not too hard and not too easy, and there should be progression and periodisation and specificity and so on. It's the details that can be argued over.

Safiri

RayCun wrote: »

I think the more nuance you want to add, the more specific you have to get.

For example, that training week I posted above. Is it too hard or too easy? Well, it depends on who is doing it. What are their recent race performances? What are their targets, races and times? How long have they been running? What has the progression of their training and their races been like? How much time are they willing/able to spend on training? What is their injury history? How do they feel at the end of each week? After each session?

Without all that, it's hard to know if that runner is working hard enough, too hard, or just right.

In principle, everyone agrees that hard days should be hard and easy days easy, but not too hard and not too easy, and there should be progression and periodisation and specificity and so on. It's the details that can be argued over.

I'm probably terrible at explaining my questions so maybe it's my fault the topic has gone this way when It wasn't what I intended it to. I quoted your post in my reply because I thought it best respresented what I was trying to ask but we ended up back at hard/easy.

While we are on it; Everyone doesn't agree with the hard days hard and easy days easy approach. Sessions are not designed by how hard or how easy they are. Some workouts can be exceptionally easy depending on what you want to achieve. Using that motto is much like telling a white lie. The problem is that once you ingrain that ithinking into someone who already has a very limited view of training, you create another roadblock in their learning progression when you have to tell them that training isn't as simple as hard or easy. Sure it might benefit them short term but you are instilling flawed fundamental training beliefs in them and only moving the roadblock down the road rather than confronting and instilling the proper fundamental concepts of training in them. It's a quick fix.

RayCun

There's the point Charlie Spedding made in his book, that you shouldn't think of a session as 'hard' and you don't make a session better by running it 'harder', is that what you mean?

Or sessions like short sprints, that might not meet a traditional distance runner's definition of 'hard' but are nonetheless important?

Testosterscone

Interesting to see the back and forth with Safiri and Raycun here opening up another element through their discussion i.e nuance in approaches. This is probably something which kinda goes against the general advice that you usually get here and online information in general and the decline in the art of coaching.

The "Hard/Easy" mantra which is regularly quoted here is seen as good advice because of the general demographic (masters athletes, newer to the sport wanting to take on the marathon) low end aerobic work see's enough stimulus for improvement and injury risk kept to minimum due to risk factor associated with age.

It also creates a mentality which is invaluable in long term development - i.e modulation of effort.

Of course there are caveats or cases where this can be tweaked but as RC mentioned this would need to get very specific as the more qualifications you have the less impact the statement has and ultimately loses all meaning. This relates to the decline of coaching per say as general approaches aren't adapted. More often than not the self coached athletes who react best to generic plans are not the ones who follow them religiously but those who have the confidence and the knowledge to "listen to their body". This in itself comes back to the idea of modulation.

Simply rounded short statements like hard days hard and easy days easy are a starting point to learn from. If you start with that saying it should lead you to the next questions of what constitutes hard and easy, and from there other factors and variables. Essentially every statement should lead to another set of questions in a never ending quest for deeper understanding of variables which can/should be manipulated.