Being that we are a gym, and that the primary reason you come here is to workout. We and you often focus on the workouts and pay lip service to some of the other facets of health and performance. When I was at the Gym Jones Fundamentals Seminar they spent quite a bit of time talking about Recovery and how it relates to debits and credits. The below image is from their FB page and is similar to what we talked about.
The premiss is simple. All stresses on the body are a debit, and all things that reduce stresses or bring the body back to homeostasis are a credit.
Lets look at stresses. Work, lack of sleep, relationship issues, sickness etc are are stresses. They contribute negativley to your body as a whole and to stay in a healthy place you must put some money back into the bank. Of particular note is that working out, and particularly intense or very difficult workouts are a debit…you must pay back for those too. You cannot workout day after day, without rest days, without mobility practices and without good eating habits and hope to make gains. A hard workout can be more detrimental than good IF you dont pay back in.
On the credits side, massage, Rolfing, foam rolling, ice baths, mobility are good and needed. At the top of the list, however is good, restful sleep and healthy eating. Make sleep and food a priority and you will see bigger gains in your health and performance than you ever thought possible.
So to reiterate…you must train HARD, but hard should not be measured in quantity of workouts ((especially those that aren’t done at full intensity (which alludes to both metcons and lifting workouts)) but are measured in FULL effort put out each time you train. Then you must recover as hard as your train. Think of training as negative points (in terms of impact on your body). Other negative points are shitty food, booze, stress etc…then by the end of the month you need to recover those negatives in positive points. Positives come from recovery workouts, good food, ice baths, sleep, rest days, and all the other things outlined above. If your monthly total is consistently negative then you are not making the most of your efforts.
Again, cant say it enough, rest and recovery are just as important as exercise, and exercise without recovery is not training, it’s just exercise.
This has always been the hardest part of training for me, on average I only get 5hrs of sleep a night and it makes for hard recoverys. But unless I quit my job my only option would be to train less or not at all and that’s not gonna happen so doing more credits like ice baths help me out a lot.