Tactical Barbell Presents: Ageless Athlete by Jim Madden

Author:Jim Madden [Madden, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

Recovery Routine

Effective recovery is not merely a matter of taking the time to let your body’s recuperative powers operate. You also need to take actions to help your body maintain those capacities. I don’t have a terribly sophisticated recovery regime, but I have found that just a few consistent practices over the years have made a big difference for me. These practices are sleep, diet, supplementation, and mobility work.

Sleep. Getting at least 7-8 hours of quality sleep has proven to be all-important for me. When I skimp on sleep, I find that I just don’t turn it around very well between workouts. When I was in graduate school, I could be “good to go” on a very truncated sleep schedule, but those days are definitely over for me. I have found that when I am disciplined in this manner, I can handle much more exercise; I need to take fewer days off; and I perform much better. I also find that when I am getting a very regular 7-8 hours of sleep every night I get fewer “junk food” cravings, and I find it generally easier to stick to my dietary plan. Higher frequency and higher quality workouts, and better dietary dispositions: it shouldn’t take more than that for you to make sleep a big priority. I’m sure that the value of good sleep for recovery and athletic performance isn’t new to anybody.27

Of course, when my kids were younger, this was all much more easily said than done. There are going to be times in your life when your family and job will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to get eight hours of sleep each night, or really any sort of regular sleep schedule. Now, however, for me my sleep habits are a question of priority, not necessity. That is, whether I get my eight hours each night is usually a matter of putting my sleep needs above other activities. I have to ask myself whether staying up to watch a movie or having an off-topic conversation at work when I should be grading a stack of papers (thereby insuring that I will be up late grading) is really worth messing up my sleep that night. For me, it helps to cast things not just as prioritizing my sleep, but in terms of the importance of my training: “What’s more important? The movie or my workout tomorrow? The gossipy conversation or recovering from that LSS run I did this morning?” When I put it in those terms, the answers are easy.

Diet. I will go into my views about diet in more detail in a subsequent chapter. Nevertheless, I have found that the amount and quality of food that I eat makes a big difference for my recovery. The closer I can get to the one gram of protein per pound of lean body weight standard, the better my recovery gets. I have also found that getting over “carbo-phobia” is very important for recovery, especially when I am in a base building or conditioning emphasis.

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