The life of a triathlete is a tough one.
Holding down a tough training regime whilst juggling family and work is hard – thats no secret.
Early starts, late finishes and work all get in the way of your recovery.
So what can you do?
- Get the relevant carbs at the relevant times, namely around your training – Higher GI post training, lower pre.
- Don’t go too low calorie – a common mistake is to up training volume and drop calories both at the same time. At first this gives amazing results, really fast weight loss. This makes us feel good, fast forward a couple of days and its game over. This leads to the typical, starve during the week, binge at the weekend cycle which leads nowhere – Sound familiar??
- Reduce inflammation – Through your training you will become inflamed, thats part of the process of improvement. However if you have the wrong nutrition this can increase this inflammation which in turn hampers how well you adapt to training. In short inflammation needs to be minimised and good nutrition is key to this.
- Making time for active rest – Meditation anyone, yes I am a fan of this and no I don’t walk round barefoot all day in baggy trousers and I don’t have ring through my nose. You don’t have to be a hippy to benefit from meditation or active rest. I have nothing against hippies by the way!
- Sleep quality – Obvious but are you getting enough and the right quality – probably not.
Arguably one of the biggest differences between the Elite athletes and you and me, other than superior genetics, is the fact they priorities their recovery.
Partly this is due to education but also because they are in a supportive environment which doesn’t always assume more is better.
They have someone to tell them to recover and someone to tell them to stop.
Quite simply:
Not recovering will makes you slower.
This is especially annoying if you do all the hard work – thats the tough bit but then if you don’t get the rewards because you don’t recover adequately – well thats just annoying.
I believe that optimal recovery is partly having the confidence to believe that doing less can be better – I know I struggled with this when I was less experienced as an athlete.
Out of the 10,000 people reading this there is going to be a very significant percentage of you who fall in to that category.
Thats not a criticism, I’ve been there so that would make me a hypocrite.
Its just how it is.
So if you want to fast forward your recovery and skip that learning process known as :
Learning by your mistakes!
Get my E – book – The Lean Triathlete Blueprint.
http://www.nutri-tri.com/e-books/
There is a section on recovery and sleep and it explains how and when to eat which carbs.
For £9.99 / 14 ish USD you would be a fool not to.
Jamie “Sleep like a baby” Leighton