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.