Hi folks, it’s Kelvin here. We run Coach for Leeds and surrounding areas, as well as online coaching. In this little video, I’m going to answer a question asked by Joe in the Virtual Run Club Facebook group, and that was just about active recovery.
So we hear a lot about active recovery. We hear terms like recovery run, and we’ve got to ask ourselves, is that something that’s causing more damage, or is it helping us recover?
What Is Active Recovery?
When we talk about active recovery, we’re talking about movement, we’re talking about getting some blood flow to the muscles. This just helps the repair process. Blood is what brings in the nutrients to the muscle.
So when I think about active recovery for my training, my training load is relatively high at the moment, so even a sort of 10 or even 12K, very easy run on fairly flat surfaces isn’t going to drive fitness in any way. It’s not going to break the muscle down so much that it’s difficult to recover from.
So a 10 to 12K run for me at a very low intensity could be classed as recovery.
For somebody whose training volume or training load rather isn’t that high, they probably want to go for a walk is the best thing that they can do because it’s quite specific, isn’t it? It’s very similar to running.
Obviously, it’s not got that impact loading, but we are using similar muscle groups, but just in a different way.
Walking and Cycling for Active Recovery
So it might be that maybe a day where we don’t run, we do a couple of 20-minute walks or something like that. Doesn’t have to be exactly that. It could be an hour.
So walking is absolutely fantastic.
Some people use a spin on the bike. That’s another way of taking out the impact loading. But there, we might actually be able to keep a reasonable amount of aerobic stimulus in, so we could do a zone one, two bike for maybe 40 minutes, again, getting some blood to the muscles and creating a sort of relatively low aerobic stimulus, again, without beating the body up too much.
And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get some blood flow to the muscles, not lose too much fitness, and give the muscles a chance to repair.
The Fundamentals of Recovery
But it’s also worth mentioning that when we think about recovery, the fundamentals of recovery are hydration, nutrition, and sleep.
So if we’ve got those in place, and when we have a day off exercise, we just sit with our feet up all day long, that’s okay.
It might be that you run the next day and you just spend a little bit more time warming up, maybe a little bit of a walk before we run.
How I Use Active Recovery in My Training
And the training blocks that I’ve just done in the last like 16 to 20 weeks have been quite high load, so recovery has been important, and what I’ve been doing is just making sure that my easier runs, which is a Tuesday with some strides, a Friday and a Sunday, that’s where my easier runs are.
My workouts on a Wednesday, my longer runs on a Saturday.
I’ve just been making sure that they’re extra easy while I’m sort of compressing some more load around the Wednesday and the Saturday as I add more specificity towards a race that’s coming up soon.
So I suppose there’s quite a lot there, and if you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the comments below.
And for now, happy running.
