When you train hard, you deserve to get good results. One of the best moments to improve your performance is the first hour after your training session. Here are 5 simple tips for a better recovery:

Cycling recovery

1. Drink water
   60% of your body weight is water, so there is buffer system to cover water loss during training. Nevertheless this water loss has a huge impact on your performance and must be replaced as soon as possible. Plain water is under normal circumstances adequate for rehydration, since solid food replaces the electrolytes lost during exercise. Thus, if you eat properly, you do not need to take any supplements to make it up for the electrolytes. Under very hot conditions it is though necessary to replace electrolytes as well as the lost water.
2. Eat carbohydrates
   Blood glucose concentration regulates the secretion of insulin, which works as an anabolic steroid for you after training. Thus, we are interested in eating carbohydrates to stimulate the secretion of insulin and get all the benefits of this naturally hormone. Insulin promotes the uptake of glucose from blood into cells (advanced version will come later), stimulates the synthesis of glycogen and promotes synthesis of muscle proteins.
3. Eat proteins
   This is not an advice I will keep for strength lifters and body builders only. Muscles cells are built of proteins and they are broken down during training. Endurance athletes also need proteins immediately after training to recover from their effort. Just like carbohydrates, proteins stimulate secretion of insulin, which help building up the muscle again.
4. Change clothes
   Get some dry clothes on immediately after training or competition. You can easily get a cold if you do not change clothes. And do it before you start to freeze, please. I have seen it a lot of times, when people are chatting after a race. Exactly that moment is one of the easiest moments to get ill. It is a very frequent mistake that happens again and again. Please do not do that mistake.
5. Cool down
   Take a short ride in small gears. It helps your muscles to recover from hard intervals or races. Removal of lactate and other metabolits is enhanced when you do light exercise. Depending on your overall fitness, I will recommend you do a 5-20 minutes ride after each training session.

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Overtraining is the result of your body’s inability to cope with the total amount of stress. Several symptoms are associated with the overtraining syndrome: Decreased performance, mood changes, weight loss, decreased appetite, muscle soreness, reduced motivation and fatigue. I guess most cyclists have experienced at least one or more of these symptoms, but that doesn’t mean that most cyclists have been overtraining.

Understanding the term overreaching
Distinguishing overtraining from overreaching is important, because overreaching is a very natural process when we train. If you take a look at one of my training programs, you will see that it is based on three weeks with overreaching followed by one recovery week. When you get to the third week, you will not feel stronger than you were in the first week, but after a recovery week with super compensation, you will be stronger than you were when you entered the program. Using a training program structure like this is what I call ‘controlled overtraining’.

Overtraining doesn’t happen overnight
Many riders use the term ‘overtraining’ for both overreaching and overtraining and I guess that is why many riders diagnose themselves as overtrained. The problem is that if you are really in an overtraining situation, it can take several months before your performance is back at 100%. If you have overreached in a period, a week or two is normally enough to get you back on track. This principle is often used in tapering protocols, where training volume is reduced the last two or three weeks before a big event. Overtraining syndrome doesn´t happen over a night or week. It takes 6 to 8 weeks or even longer to develop.

The cure is recovery
The cure for overtraining syndrome is often a significantly reduced training volume and intensity. Your body needs time to fully recover from the total accumulated stress in the past months. When you are overtrained, you have probably forgotten about basic principles of recovery. A differential diagnosis could also be that you have reached a training plateau, which is also a very natural thing, still frustrating though. I covered that topic in two posts – Dealing with training vacuum – Part one and two.

Theories about overtraining
Our understanding of what overtraining really is relies on theories that are not yet proved. Sympathetic and parasympathetic overtraining is often discussed, referring to the autonomic nervous system. In this model the symptoms are caused by an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system. This theory was made back in 1958, but still one of the most referred theories about overtraining.

Minimize the risk
As we don’t know what overtraining exactly is, we should try to use our knowledge about basic exercise physiology to prevent development of overtraining. A good strategy is to write a training diary. When you notice some of the symptoms mentioned above, then consider whether that is caused by an insufficient recovery from the past training. In this way it is possible to minimize the risk of overtraining, because a training diary implies you to react early.

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Exercise-induced muscle cramps are common among cyclists in the end of hard races. Some riders seem to have more frequent episodes of muscle cramps than others, but most cyclists have experienced the phenomena.

It is often written that hydration with water and different electrolytes may protect riders from muscle cramps, since dehydration and electrolyte imbalance is very close related to these involuntary, painful muscle contractions. One of the potential risks is exercising in hot environment because of dehydration and massive loss of sodium, potassium, magnesium and other electrolytes. When this water loss is recovered with plain water, there will be a net loss of electrolytes. In old days hard working people who worked in mines died because of an excessive water intake that diluted the concentration of electrolytes. This was called ‘Minors Cramp’.

Scientists from the University of North Carolina have published an article in Journal of athletic training, June 2005: Influence of Hydration and Electrolyte Supplementation on Incidence and Time to Onset of Exercise-Associated Muscle Cramps.

In this study 13 men with a history of exercise-induced muscle cramps performed two tests that were made to provoke muscle cramps in the calves. One test was done with supplementation of water, carbohydrates and sodium, while the other test was done without any supplementation. The findings were that 9 people developed muscle cramps in the hydration/supplementation trial and 7 people did in the dehydration trial. These findings do not indicate that hydration and supplementation with carbohydrates and electrolytes protect against muscle cramps. It tells us that there are other factors implicated in development of exercise-induced muscle cramps. However, in the hydration/supplementation trial, the time to onset of muscle cramps were prolonged (36.8 minutes completed before onset, compared to only 14.6 minutes in the dehydration trial.)

In my opinion, the study should have included a trial with plain water only. This should be done to see if it was the water or the supplementation that prolonged the time to onset of muscle cramps.

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When you start your cycling career, central adaptations increase your performance rapidly in the first three months. After one year of training you will discover that it takes more time to gain improvements. Now you will have to think more about how to train to keep improving. At this time improvements are often due to peripheral adaptations.

When you have trained seriously for a couple of years, you will experience that more training is needed before you get significant improvements. At this time you get the feeling of a training vacuum. You train more than you have ever done before, but your form does not change at all.

This is a critical moment in every serious riders´ career. The common outcome is that you sooner or later realize that you are not making further progress with the current program. You take the consequences and start making things different. This could be quitting, switching coach, switching club, different training methods, more training, less training, new bike, new wheels, eating nutritional supplements or getting so desperate that you take drugs. But often you will not realize that the problem is a training vacuum, because you have optimized cycling performance through proper training, eating and resting. Instead you victimize your coach, club or material because your performance has reached a plateau.

In the final part of your career cycling efficiency, tactics and experiences play a bigger role. You will use your knowledge about race tactics to eliminate eventually stronger opponents. You can win races without being the strongest rider, but making the correct moves at the correct moments, because of your gut feeling.

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Resting heart rate is not always equal to performance

Monitoring your resting heart rate is a good discipline to integrate in your daily procedures since it can give you some important information about your fitness. When you have registered your resting heart rate in the morning for a period of time (months) you will start to see a pattern. There are days with low resting heart rates and there are days with high values.

Notice long term changes in resting heart rate

The most important observation for you will be that there is some but not a total correlation between resting heart rate and cycling performance. Small differences in the same week has nothing to do with improved performance but is a lot more a question about level of recovery, sleep pattern, physical and psychological stress level etc. Differences observed over a longer period (months) might very likely be seen because of a central adaptation. Due to a better relaxation (regulated by autonomic nerve system) there is a better filling of the heart in the diastole and thus a larger stroke volume in the systole.

Don’t compare heart rate values…
As I have mentioned a couple of times before: It doesn’t make sense to compare absolute heart rate values with others because we all have a different anatomy. As an example, I have registered a low resting heart rate of 36bpm in a period with a very small amount of cardiovascular training. I wonder how many of you hard training individuals who have the same value? That doesn’t matter! You are probably stronger than I was at that time anyway…

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Polar s810 can measure your heartbeat intervals. The differences in these periods reflect your autonomic nervous system when it regulates your heartbeat. This measurement is most useful at rest or at low intensities, because we are talking about very small differences (msecs.) Your relaxation rate indicates the state of your physical recovery. If you are overtrained, it might very well be reflected on the Polar s810 monitor.

Read the article about Polar s810 and heart rate variability

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