Offseason Training Recovery

Strategies

First and foremost, when creating any system for my athletes I care far

too much about them then to go with anything that isn’t proven by

science. For that reason, this eBook will be broken down into 3

sections:

1. Proven recovery strategies

2. Unproven strategies, but they may have some merit

3. Useless recovery strategies

I have broken it into these three categories so you can get a full grip

on what I want you to focus on from most to least, and also what not

to do at all. Very often guys at the gym will read something in a

magazine and pass it on and before you know it there is a large group

of people, although well meaning, doing something completely

ineffective and in some cases detrimental to their progress.

Proven Recovery Strategies

The strategies in this section work, and work well. The advantage of

this section is:

They have strong supporting research behind them

They logically align up from the current knowledge of sports

science in combination with the offseason hockey system

They have been both used in research and by a large number

of people with loads of practical experience

When you’re using all three effectively, you’re doing yourself a

massive favor in offseason training performance enhancement

#1. Sleep

Sleep is one of the biggest factors, if not the biggest factor is successful

recovery. Even if everything else is perfectly in sync, if you don’t sleep

well, you won’t recover. An easy example to think about is let’s say

your diet is bang on and your recovery supplements are perfectly on

track, but then you only slept for 3hrs a night for the next 4 days. How

well recovered do you think you’re going to feel? How hard do you

think you’re going to be able to train? I can tell you straight up you’re

going to feel like crap and train like crap.

Some people may or may not be able to get away with that for a very

short period of time. But let me tell you there isn’t a person alive who

can do that long term and be successful in anything. Sleep is required

for mind and body and without it you’re a zombie.

Sleep is something so important your body forces you to do it,

everyday, no matter what. It is not optional. Going chronically without

adequate sleep leads to decreases in performance, inadequate

recovery, decreases in neurotransmitters, decrease thyroid output,

decreases in growth hormone, decreases in motor ability, technique

execution difficulties, decreased glucose management, increases in

stress hormones and decreases in testosterone. Turn those all into their

opposites and you have what a good night of sleep brings you, pretty

anabolic I’d say.

I’m sure you got it by now that sleep is irreplaceable aspect of your

recovery strategies. But how do we get a GOOD sleep? Everybody

sleeps, but also a lot of people still complain of fatigue, and morning

fatigue. So, here are so strategies to make sure you are getting a good

sleep:

Turn all lights off in your room. No lights whatsoever. Lights disrupt

deep sleep patterns and melatonin production. Your room

should be absolutely pitch black.

Remove all electronics from your room. No TV, no radio, no Wi-

Fi, no cell phone, no computer. Nothing. Only thing that should

be in your room is an alarm clock.

DO NOT USE YOUR PHONE AS AN ALARM CLOCK. This disrupts

deep sleep like it is their job, especially if you sleep with it near

your head. Radio waves and Wi-Fi emitted by phones disrupts

deep sleep and can mess with your ability to get to sleep. Forget

the phone. Turn it off and keep it in the bathroom.

Supplement with magnesium during the PM. Preferably with your

last two meals of the day after 4pm.

Try to calm down at night time. Nobody ever went to bed

relaxed and ready to properly sleep just after watching UFC or

action movies. Not going to happen. Reading leisurely (not

researching or planning) is a great way to calm down and prime

your body for rest.

Go to bed and get out of bed at the same times every day.

Make it routine.

One last thing that is important to note, is there is no optimal amount

of sleep, there is only an optimal amount of sleep for YOU. Some

people only need 7hrs, some people need up to 10hrs per night. The

idea is to get enough to where you feel best. If you can function

throughout the day at a high level without massive doses of caffeine,

then you’re probably good. But if you are chronically under rested it

should be your #1 priority before ANYTHING else.

#2. Food

Second only to sleep, food is the biggest fatigue fighter. Unlike sleep

where getting just enough is optimal, with food, the more the better

(up to a point, after that your just overindulging).

Training very hard creates a debt, much of that debt is repaid through

food. This brings up a point, a lot of guys run into “not being able to

gain weight” issues. This is entirely a food issue. It is very simple, you

need to eat more calories than you expend. If you’re very active, you

will need to eat that much more, if you’re not very active, you won’t

need to eat a whole lot to gain weight.

You are not different.

You are not somebody who can miraculously make food energy

disappear in your body and not be able to gain any weight. “I eat so

much food and I’m not gaining weight, what should I do?” Well sir,

you don’t eat a lot of food. You know how I know that? Because

you’re not gaining weight.

From a recovery and muscle building standpoint, you need to be able

to eat enough food to both support recovery from exercise, AND build

muscle on top of that. That requires a decent amount of food. But

when properly scheduled into your day and with the right selection of

foods, it’s not so bad. Positive adaptation from exercise will only occur

if you give your body the raw materials to create it. For example,

amino acids to support muscle growth and recovery. Carbohydrates

to support fuel for optimal performance which will lead to better

strength and mass gain. Healthy fats to support healthy and elevated

anabolic hormone levels. None of this can occur without the right

nutrients and the right amounts of those nutrients. Food is massively

pivotal in your success as a hockey player.

Following the proper meal plan designated for your body weight and

goal can make or break you with your success in this system. This will

ensure you are getting all the adequate nutrients to support your

progress to its maximum level and speed. No sense in training in the

gym and working so damn hard if you’re not going to reap the

rewards. Almost all these rewards are reaped through food. I can’t

say that enough. Calories and macronutrients are kings when it comes

to recovery.

#3. Relaxing activity

Engaging in low stress, fun activities can help quite substantially with

your rate of recovery. This is a large fighter of the central fatigue

concept explained in the “Offseason Recovery Explained” eBook.

To put it short, cumulative fatigue from ANY AND ALL forms of stressors

affect the same system. This can be training, conditioning, getting in

a fight with your girlfriend, getting pissed off because you suck at

guitar and can’t learn a song, psychological stressors, stressing out

about an exam, among many others. A big takeaway here is, all of

these sources of fatigue sum up your total fatigue at any one given

time, and their negative effects on your training will be expressed

regardless of their source. Yes it is possible that a week of stressfully

studying for an exam can effect training productivity, even a week

after that exam is done and completed and all is well.

What is important to understand is the simple act of bringing down

stress levels greatly improves recovery, and fun relaxing activities do a

great job at this. On top of this, bringing down stress also improves

sleep (#1 strategy) and digestion (#2 strategy). So not only does it

improve recovery in its own merit, it also improves the effectiveness of

the other strategies of recovery. I’m quite certain you get it but I’m

going to have to repeat that these activities have to be relaxing, not

draining. So parties and competitive games of basketball are out of

the picture. Here are some good ideas to improve recovery and bring

down stress:

Going out to the movies with friends

Going for a walk in the park or walking your dog

Watching multiple episodes of your favorite TV show on Netflix

Hanging out with friend or with your girlfriend

Leisure sports or non-competitive games

Hiking

Going out to dinner

Getting a massage (this is a big one)

Last but not least, one of the most impactful things I can say to you in

this principal is the fact that you need to learn how to react well to

stressors. It has been said many times that:

“10% of what happens to you in life is the stressor and the other 90% is

how well you react to it”

How well, or how poorly you react to a given stressor determines how

much, or how little it is going to affect you. The act of stressing out

creates a cascade of hormones that do nothing but cause harm in

your body. Do your best to create an attitude of calm to your life. Think

before you react and just relax. Stressing out is a whole lot like sitting

in a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you

nowhere.

Unproven But Worth A Try

This section offers one recovery strategy that doesn’t do so well in the

research, but has enough empirical evidence to build a positive case

from. It has gained a ton of popularity and has been used for a long

time by athletes of all genres.

#1: Contrast showers

The contrast shower approach offers many of the same supposed

benefits that ice baths do, just without the ice. It is a slightly more

comfortable approach (not sure if comfortable is still the right word

though! Haha) then the ice baths and will still may boost recovery rate

so you can get in the gym faster and train harder.

Give them a shot if you feel they work for you, there is an army of

people who use them. In the research, it is quite inconclusive. But

these strategies when taken to the extremes can do more harm than

good. Additionally, a strategy such as this should never be used in my

opinion until you have mastered the top 3 strategies and are still

looking for something else.

How a contrast shower works varies between which coaches you talk

to. The method I am going to use for the Offseason training system

requires a shower, and a stop watch. It’s important to keep a timing

device around because you are going to be spending more time in

the heat then you are the cold, and going by time keeps you honest,

if you go by feel you will cheat yourself out of the uncomforting

temperatures that will be providing benefit.

You begin with hot water, and switch to cold water. Then, through

each cycle, you make the hot hotter, and the cold colder. By the last

round it should be uncomfortably hot and uncomfortably cold. It is

also important to note that you always want to end on cold. After the

shower, quickly warm up with a towel.

The durations of these can vary based on how much time you have

and also how grueling the workout was. The back to back hot / cold

environment creates a “pump” effect in the muscles which can

improve the removal of exercise produced waste products. Which are

the main things that drive soreness and inflammation in your muscles

in the days after training. Here’s how it break down:

STANDARD TRAINING PROTOCOL LIGHT TRAINING PROTOCOL

3-4 cycles

3 minutes of hot

1 minute of cold

Finish on cold

2-3 cycles

1 minute hot

30 secs cold

Finish on cold

Useless Recovery Strategies

The strategies in this category are ones commonly recommended by

gyms and coaches who don’t know what they are talking about. I

thought it was important to include all effective, may be effective and

ineffective strategies in this book so you can have a greater outlook

on where you and your team should be focusing its efforts. Knowing

what doesn’t work it just as powerful as knowing what works. When

using the Offseason training program I would prefer you steer clear of

these strategies for 2 reasons:

a) They are ineffective

b) They waste your time when you could be using that time to focus

a greater effort on the above strategies

#1. Unnecessary stretching

It is important to note here that athletes have been stretching for a

long time, and this reason is the improve flexibility, not to improve

recovery. As a hockey player, ensuring both your static and dynamic

flexibility are in check pays great dividends to your on-ice

performance.

From a scientific evidence standpoint, there is no evidence

suggesting it improves the recovery process. None. And when you

think about it, some people take stretching to a very uncomforting

state. This leads me to believe it can even delay the recovery process

as you are adding an additional stress to the muscle trying to repair its

damage.

If it does nothing to improve recovery, and may even delay recovery,

let’s avoid it all together. Just stick to stretching to improve flexibility,

not to improve recovery. Better placed prior to training than after.

#2. Sauna, hot tub or steam room extremes

Now you might be thinking this could be an option for the proven

“Relaxing activity” strategy, and you would be correct, up to a point.

The problem is athletes and general population take this to too much

of an extreme and exposure to high heats for longer periods of time

cause some issues:

a) Dehydration: This is especially true if you just trained. Dehydration

plays a huge role in all bodily functions including hormone

homeostasis, building muscle, burning fat, maintaining body

temperature, improving digestion, increasing performance in

both strength and endurance among many other things.

Creating an unnecessary debt in hydration delays and has a

negative effect on recovery.

b) Exposure to high temperatures can cause elevated stress

hormones due to the temporary fatigue it causes and bring

multiple systems out of their normal range. This can act as

another fatigue creator in the accumulative fatigue equation

we discussed above, which goes against what we need to do

for proper recovery. These disrupted systems need to be brought

back down to homeostasis upon exiting the high temperature

area, which can be energy costly in of itself, wasting more

energy away to something that is not recovery.

The big take away here for high temperature areas is time is key. Not

too often and not too long, or it can become a negative thing. Those

long durations, especially when you start to feel tired in there, create

more fatigue than anything else. Additionally, ensuring hydration

during this process would be smart.

#3. Low intensity cardio to reduce soreness

During the offseason when things like gaining muscle mass and

maximal strength are key, incorporating long cool downs, jogging or

cycling can be a defeating technique. To put it simply, your body

adapts to what it is exposed to most. If you want your training phase

to get you big and strong, you focus on that and your body knows

what it needs to adapt to. If you want your training phase to increase

your endurance, you focus on that and your body knows what to

adapt to. If you train for both, your body will get a little stronger and

your endurance will get a little better, but neither will be at the level it

would have been at had you been more focused.

Incorporating low intensity cardio throws things off at the cellular level.

There is such a thing called intracellular signalling and it plays a major

role in how you are going to develop as an athlete. They are the

signallers that tell your body “Hey! Send nutrients to come build

muscle over here!”

A variety of cellular messengers are activated, but one of the big guys

who respond to resistance training is mTOR. mTOR is a very powerful

regulator of muscle growth, it truly does turn on muscle growth after

resistance training. But, low intensity cardio sets of a different cascade

by up regulating AMPk. AMPk leads to endurance adaptations like

increasing mitochondrial density in the muscle among many other

things.

See what is going on here? Two complete and opposite internal

signalling processes. What happens is that very same cool down

you’re doing to reduce soreness, is also decreasing the intracellular

signalling which is going to decrease the strength and muscle mass

adaptations you worked for during your resistance training workout.

Pretty counterproductive if you ask me.

To put the nail in the coffin, low intensity cardio also effects your

nervous systems ability to adapt to resistance training which drastically

effects strength and anaerobic conditioning. Not good for hockey

players!

#4. Anti-inflammatories

Inflammation and soreness are a part of the process. The inflammation

is there for a reason, it is there to help the proper signalling process go

down in your body to ensure you adapt to the new stress and also to

kick start recovery. Your body never does anything for no reason,

inflammation is required for maximal adaptation from exercise. Trying

to decrease inflammation and decrease muscle soreness by taking

Advil’s, aspirin’s, ibuprofen’s or any other anti-inflammatory is throwing

off the normal signalling process in the body which leads to greater

gains. It is very well known now that these products decrease exercise

adaptations due to their lowering effect on inflammation. There are

too many jokes I could make about you if you need an aspirin to deal

with leg soreness, suck it up!

Only use them if you have to, such as an injury situation. Other than

that, just deal with it.