Train hard. Recover hard.

An idea I’ve heard before.

But has only sunk in for me since travelling around Central America the last couple months.

With every intention to keep up (a version) of my usual training routine.

I thought access to training would be the hard part.

It’s not. You can run, swim, stretch, do strength training anywhere.

Turns out the hard part has been recovery.

Because quality sleep, nutrition and other recovery tools just aren’t as accessible as they are at home.

Here’s the thing:

Training and recovery go hand in hand.

You can’t have one without the other.

In training, we stress the body. We’re breaking it down (known as a catabolic state).

Then we recover from that stress. We’re rebuilding, growing and coming back stronger (known as an anabolic state).

It’s how we adapt and improve.

So it’s important we balance our training intensity and volume with our recovery.

I call it “recovery matching”.

When we’re pushing up our training, we need to push up our recovery efforts to match it.

It goes the other way too.

If we’re in a hectic period (whether it’s family, work, travel, whatever) we might have less time or access to good sleep, to shopping and eating well, and using other recovery tools.

So we might have to pull our training back a nudge.

Because over time, if we don’t match our recovery to our training, we risk injury, fatigue and burnout.

Guaranteed decreased performance.

Some of it’s intuitive. If we’re training hard, we’ll feel tired. So we’ll sleep more. We’ll be hungrier, so we’ll eat more. We’ll be sore, so we’ll stretch more. Maybe get a massage. Hit a recovery centre.

Some of it isn’t. Largely because training is emphasised over recovery in the fitness world. So when life starts to stack up on us. It’s usually our recovery that takes the hit before our training.

Like trying to keep up with your usual high-intensity sessions when you’re up 3+ times a night rocking your newborn. It’s a recipe for cooking yourself.

So it’s an important concept to understand as we move through the seasons of life.