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| The main problem is not that athletes don't do enough work: indeed, they usually pile on too much work and fail to devote enough time to recovery. In this article I will talk about swimming events and why some athletes become stale as a season goes on. |
By: Owen Anderson
To reach peak levels of performance, athletes need to find a way to blend very hard training with exactly the right amounts of rest and recovery. Finding this optimal balance between work and recovery is a very difficult challenge.
Unsure About Recovery Time
The main problem is not that athletes don't do enough work: indeed, they usually pile on too much work and fail to devote enough time to recovery. But the fact is that many athletes are unsure about how much recovery they need after each quality workout, and also about how much rest to build into each week, month and year of training.
This is unfortunate, because an athlete's pattern of recovery can make or break his/her entire training program.
 Physiological Details Of Recovery
Practical Concerns
But most athletes don't care too much about the specific physiological details of recovery. Instead, they want answers to practical questions, such as:
- After a tough workout, how long does it really take to recover?
- How can I tell when I am really ready to perform another serious workout?
- When am I on the verge of overtraining and in need of a longer break than usual?
- Is there some way to monitor my recovery during specific portions of my training cycle to calculate whether it is going well?
Fortunately, there are relatively straightforward answers to these questions, and these are particularly important for athletes and coaches who believe that performance can be optimized by training at an extremely high level - very close to the point of overtraining.
Risking Overtraining
For such people, the closest approach to overtraining usually occurs just a few weeks before the most important competition of the year.
During the remaining weeks, training load is drastically reduced during a special recovery period known as a 'taper' to enable athletes to pull back from the precipice of overtraining and allow optimal muscular, neural, cardiac, and endocrine adaptations to occur.
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How To Benefit From Planned Overtraining!
What is overtraining, and can we benefit from it? Well overtraining itself is not what you want, however over-reaching by design can be a good thing. To get more detail on this topic continue below.
[ Click here to learn more. ] |
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Such athletes need a monitoring system, which stops them toppling over the precipice, and indeed all athletes who hope to improve their performances can benefit from a monitoring plan, which provides information about the effectiveness of their recovery programs.
Good recovery monitoring systems keep athletes from doing too much or too little hard training.
In Search Of Reliable Indicators
Exercise physiologists have made a serious attempt to help athletes monitor their training and recovery and avoid the overtrained state. Physiologists who are interested in recovery have noted that athletes who perform very well after tapering tend to show the following traits toward the ends of their recovery periods: improved muscular strength and power, fewer sleep disturbances, reduced stress and fatigue, lower rates of perceived exertion during exercise, lower heart beats during activity, and brighter overall mood.
In the light of these encouraging findings, scientists have gone on to explore whether these variables could be used as reliable indicators of effective recovery.
In one study, scientists monitored a group of swimmers over a six-month season of training and competition, paying special attention to their ratings of wellbeing (eg fatigue, stress and muscle soreness) during a recovery (tapering) period.
  
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Kicking Drill For The Breaststroke. Learn More.
They found that simple measures of wellbeing were reasonably good at predicting competitive performance improvement, accounting for 72% of the variation in improvement in race times compared with previous bests1.
Australian Study
Australian scientists recently attempted to broaden this research to include other variables besides overall wellbeing in a study of 10 elite swimmers (four male and six female) who were training and tapering for national championships. Five of these individuals were ranked in the fastest 20 times in the world and all were specialists at 100 or 200m, using a various stroke styles2.
Before & During Tapering
Before tapering commenced, the swimmers had trained for a minimum of 18 weeks, with both the training and tapering plans designed by their individual coaches. For the week before and during the overall tapering period, all 10 swimmers kept a daily log of training details, which included swimming distance, time in the gym and training intensity, evaluated on a scale from 1 (very, very easy) to 7 (very, very hard).
Before getting up in the morning, the swimmers checked their early morning heart rates manually (by feeling their carotid arteries).
Body mass was measured daily, and menstruation status, illness and injury were also recorded. Ratings of wellbeing for fatigue, quality of sleep, stress and muscle soreness were recorded daily, again on a scale from 1 (very, very good) to 7 (very, very bad).
Before tapering, the swimmers averaged 47k of swimming per week at an average intensity of 5.3 (between 'hard' and 'very hard'). They also included 5.3 hours of gym (strengthening) work in an average week.
By the second week of the taper, they were down to 30.5k of weekly swimming at an average intensity of 4.2, and just 0.4 hours of strengthening work in the gym. At the end of the taper (which lasted for 17 days), the swimmers took part in the national championships.
Testing
The athletes were tested just before the start of the tapering period and again after two weeks of tapering (three days before competition). The tests included resting heart rate, blood pressure and blood lactate measurements, together with a Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire.
The athletes were also checked during exercise: after a standard warm-up, peak force during tethered swimming was measured for each athlete using a load cell, attached to the swimmer by nylon ropes anchored to a waist belt. After an active rest of 400m of easy swimming, each subject completed an even-paced 200m freestyle swim at 80% of his/her personal-best pace. Five seconds after this, heart rate was recorded.
After another 400m of easy swimming (10 minutes total time), each swimmer completed a single max effort over 100m, using his or her principal racing style, with heart rate again measured five seconds afterwards and blood lactate assessed five minutes later. The time in this all-out 100m swim was used as the performance measure for assessing the benefits of tapering.
The Event
In the event, the change in performance associated with recovery was most effectively predicted by changes in plasma norepinephrine concentration, heart rate after the max 100m swim and the POMS (Profile of Mood States) measure of the psychological state of confusion.
Decreases in plasma norepinephrine and increases in max heart rate were associated with better performances, as were reduced levels of confusion. Plasma norepinephrine was the best single predictor of performance, with changes in concentrations of this hormone predicting 82% of the variation between pre- and post-tapering performances!
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The spherical or elongated organelles in the cytoplasm of nearly all eukaryotic cells, containing genetic material and many enzymes important for cell metabolism, including those responsible for the conversion of food to usable energy. Also called chondriosome. 
