Sunday, January 20, 2013

Variants on Recovery

I recover better with company.
It seems like I figure this out every year or so.

Most endurance plans orient training by month, in four-week chunks. They give three weeks of hard work for every one week of recovery. Seems like every time I write a new training plan for myself, I start with this schedule. And every time, two or three months into training, I get overloaded and end up taking my recovery a week early. Sometimes, like with this training cycle, I lose my motivation and get caught in two or three weeks of recovery.

It makes sense that there would be natural variations among members of our species on how much work we can do, relative to how much rest we need. And there's nothing special about a seven-day week, either, or a four-week month. It's not like our species evolved with modern weeks or months. There's no real reason to maintain this dominant ratio. Except that it's what everyone else does.

I plan to start marching to the beat of my own drum in this regard, however; it's a waste of time to re-do my training plan because I overestimated my own training capacity.

3 comments:

  1. I love this idea. Humans are similar but not identical, our bodies all function and recover in different ways. Rest up and be well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interested to read about the training plan that you come up with.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Recovery is one of the biggest resource that we have. Come back down and start with new energy. But I think it's already done!? ^^

    ReplyDelete