It's at times like this when you can start giving yourself a hard time that your not doing enough training. It's a trap everyone falls into; we think more training = better performance. However the training is the stimulus for the body to adapt but the improvement takes place when we recover. I find it useful to bear this in mind when I can't train. Most people find it hard to be disciplined about recovery, this can lead to overtraining. Many athletes slip in an extra session in order to gain an edge.
To overtrain you have;
1. No rest days
2. No regeneration week every 2-3 weeks
3. Monotonous training programmes
4. More than 3 hours training a day
5. More than 30% training load increase in a week
6. No alternation of hard/easy days.
7. No complete break once a year
It has been shown that many athletes are fitter on the plane back from major events just because of the break they have had after the competition! It's good to remember what Lance Armstrong said about the tour - "it's the person who recovers best who wins"
It is useful to think about recovery as both mental and physical. It's interesting to note that for physical recovery you don't necessarily need to sleep it's the absence of movement (something I find difficult!) that's important. Sleep is more important for the mental side of things like motivation etc,
The pro's use HRV (heart rate variability) and EPOC (excess post exercise oxygen consumption) to monitor whether they are recovered for the next session. I wrote a paper back in 1993 on HRV but unfortunately have no access to measuring it.
The graph below is from wikipedia; supercompensation is what we are trying to achieve with our training. If you haven't recovered adequately before your next session the graph slowly heads down - you get ill or injured etc,
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