Recovery: your key to success

We always pay much attention to train harder, to be able to support more workloads, to train more days, more time... However, little attention pay to recovery processes which is where there really are benefits and adaptations that we want. Please bear in mind that if you pay attention to these processes, you get benefits as or more important than with your own training load.

The recovery is not only to sleep. In the field of training, recovery begins after the last repeat, at the moment in that end up your career or when get off the bike, and can last for days depending on load and media that you put to facilitate these processes. To get the best results you must point recovery in three levels: metabolic, structural and nervous.

During the effort, our body is catabolic phase, i.e. degraded molecules to obtain the necessary energy, mainly the phosphagen and stored in muscle glycogen reserves.

Muscle contractions, either by high-intensity as a strength training, or amount for a long time as the race or cycling, cause tissue damage in tissues at all levels: muscle, connective, and even bone. In this case, recovery involves resynthesizing contractile and of support structures.

The recovery of the nervous system

High training periods decrease availability of neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and dopamine, which are in charge of "communicating" our muscles with the central nervous system. Can symptoms such as fatigue, lack of coordination, apathy, etc.

Streamline recovery processes can make the difference between a proper performance or overtraining and the failure to achieve your goals. Now you will describe the measures which should not miss on your planning, some of which are highly recommended and others that many people think that they might help but that may actually be even counterproductive.

? Respects adaptations

The fundamental principle is to respect the times that our different systems required to assimilate and produce the necessary adaptations in each application of the training load. In this box you have, by way of guidance, the recommended minimum time that is necessary to respect between each load according to the ability to develop in a person already trained.