The first comprehensive, practical exploration of the art and science of athletic rest from a certified cycling, triathlon, and running coach.
If you’ve hit a wall in your training, maybe it’s because your body isn’t recovering enough from each workout to become stronger.
In The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery, Sage Rountree will guide you to full recovery and improved performance, revealing how to measure your fatigue and recovery, how much rest you need, and how to make the best use of recovery tools. Drawing on her own experience along with interviews with coaches, trainers, and elite athletes, Rountree details daily recovery techniques, demystifying common aids like ice baths, compression apparel, and supplements. She explains in detail how to employ restorative practices such as massage, meditation, and yoga. You will learn which methods work best and how and when they are most effective.
The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery explores:
- Periodization and overtraining
- Ways to measure fatigue and recovery including heart rate tests, heart rate variability, EPOC, and apps
- Stress reduction
- Sleep, napping, nutrition, hydration, and supplements
- Cold and heat like icing, ice baths, saunas, steam rooms, whirlpools, and heating pads
- Home remedies including compression wear, creams, and salts
- Technological aids like e-stim, ultrasound, Normatec
- Massage, self-massage, and foam rolling
- Restorative yoga
- Meditation and breathing
Then you can put these tools and techniques to practice using two comprehensive recovery plans for both short- and long-distance training. This invaluable resource will enable you to maintain that hard-to-find balance between rigorous training and rest so that you can feel great and compete at your highest level.
Sage provides many simple, yet very effective, ways to thing about, and implement recovery.
All levels from beginner to masters athletes and beyond will take something away from the wisdom she presents.
Thanks, Sage!
Thanks
In Sage Rountree's new book The Athlete's Guide to Recovery, Rest & Restore for Peak Performance, he explains how its harder to RECOVER than it is to Exercise.. it's about finding the balance between working enough and resting enough. You should treat recovery as an extension of your training.. Say if you are passionate about Bodypump, then you should be JUST as passionate about recovery ! "You have to go easy to be able to go HARD." Now it's starting to make sense.
Paying attention to recovery takes time and discipline. Of course our idea of recovery may be to kick back and relax, watch some television, while folding laundry AND checking the facebook account. NOT> The body needs to have quite a fine balance between work and recovery. "You can drive a car across the country, and then get in the car and drive the next day.. You can't do the same thing with the body. Use your energy where it is best spent. When you rest, REST.
I'm only on chapter 11 in the book, but I've learned SO much already. Rest involves planning workout days and REST days. He talks about the importance of breathing and work load. Each chapter is delegated to a section that stands alone. Hard work tears down the body, but REST allows the body to repair itself and come back stronger than before.
I found this book a valuable resource. In the back there are charts and such. Whatever you need to know about recovery, you can find it here... Definitely a good read, OR a gift to a person in your family... :)
The Athlete's Guide to Recovery: Rest, Relax, and Restore for Peak Performance
Athletes tend to put recovery on the back burner, which results in overtraining and injury. The Athletes Guide to Recovery does a fantastic job presenting scientific evidence outlining the various cycles of training, and further educates how to take your own personal inventory so as to avoid overtraining.
A large portion of the book is dedicated to recovery techniques, and covers absolutely everything you could possibly imagine from sleep, self-massage, nutrition, hydration, compression socks and so much more. Many of the techniques described are simple and low in cost, yet have a tremendous impact.
The protocols for applying the techniques described in the book are broken down for short-distance training (under two hours) and long-distance training (over two hours). Again, proof that any athlete can benefit from this book.
Bottom Line: Buy this book TODAY, along with sticky notes and a highlighter pen. This is an invaluable training tool.
Thank you Sage for an excellent contribution to the athletic/health literature.
There are several examples of tracking programs that measure both the intensity and duration of the workout to provide guidance as to when to recover. This has really changed the way I think about recovery!