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 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.
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.
The muscular system, for instance, often yearns for an opportunity to fix up cell membranes torn during strenuous effort; muscles also require the time and materials to fill energy depots and to synthesize new enzymes and energy-producing structures like mitochondria.
During recovery, the nervous system 're-wires' itself so that it can better control the specialized motor patterns used during training, while the endocrine system must return to equilibrium following the hormonal upsets induced by rugged exertion.
But most athletes don't care too much about the specific physiological details of recovery. Instead, they want answers to practical questions, such as:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before & During Tapering
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 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
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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Physiological Details Of Recovery
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. 
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