Triathlon Training and Recovery

Triathlon

Recovery Training

Angela Calder
Australian Institute of Sport

Chapter 1: The Principle of Recovery

Background

Recovery is a general term used to describe the adaptations to workloads after an athlete has been exposed to training or competition. For a healthy, functioning athlete the term refers to a positive response to training stimuli leading to adaptation to those stressors. Such adaptation can be physical or psychological in nature and the recovery processes involved are often referred to as restoration and regeneration (Calder 1990). Failure to recover from training and competition invariably leads to maladaptation.

Failure to adapt to training stressors, either physical or psychological, can lead to detrimental conditions common to many athletes such as overtraining, overuse or burnout. These require specialist intervention by clinical practitioners from sports medicine and sport psychology. This type of recovery is called rehabilitation and lies outside the scope of this article.

Until recent times talent was the sole prescription for success in sport, but today, to be the best, athletes need to work harder, pushing themselves to greater physical and mental extremes, and be able to adapt to such rigorous work. Training hard and training smart are not always synonymous. For many athletes the question becomes ‘How can I train hard without getting injured or sick?’ The answer is simple. To be able to perform at their best without experiencing these setbacks, each athlete needs to follow the formula for success:

Work Hard + Recover Well = Best Performance

Many athletes work hard but often ignore recovery training activities except when they are ill or injured, yet these practices are an essential ingredient for a balanced training program. Indeed, the principle of recovery is one of the basic principles of training (Rushall & Pyke 1990), but it is the one most frequently forgotten by athletes and coaches.

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