Most climbers know that climbing or training every day is a quick way to end up burned out and injured. Our bodies need rest to recover from training sessions and days out climbing. However, calling days away from climbing and training “rest days” implies that they are passive and we need to just let them happen. In reality, though, we have a lot of control over how well we are recovering. Dedicated climbers should be as passionate and serious about the quality of their rest as they are about their training.
To help shed some light on how we can be more active in improving the quality of our recovery, here’s an article by coach and trainer Steve Bechtel of Climb Strong.
“Recovery is a huge growth area in sport science. Understanding that we can actually improve athletes quality and speed of recovery has led to some really good practices over the past couple of decades. From better tissue care, to better fueling, to better session design, there are many ways to recover better so you can train better. Below, I’ll outline the eight strategies that we’ve seen the most successful and easy to implement. I have only included strategies that are workable in the real-world with a normal person’s budget.” – Steve Bechtel
Recovery Training
In the article, Bechtel describes eight simple, realistic, and cost-effective steps all climbers can take to ensure better recovery. They are:
- Sleep more
- Eat after training
- Drink more water
- Take a nap
- Do your cardio
- Take a cold shower
- Back of the beer
- Eat protein before (or during) training
Click through below to read more about all these measures and why they help improve our recovery in the full article.
However, as Bechtel points out, this is not an exhaustive list and he includes links to a lot of additional reading material on how to improve recovery speed and quality. The most important take away though is that if you are serious about your training then you need to be just as serious about recovering from it. They are two sides of the same coin.
Full Article: Climb Strong – Recovery Training
(photo courtesy of climbstrong.com)
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