Why You’re Not Recovering

Recovery is one of those things everyone knows is important, but very few people actually pay attention to until they feel absolutely cooked.

If you’re training hard, running multiple times a week, lifting heavy and trying to build muscle at the same time, you’re creating a lot of fatigue. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Training needs to create stress for your body to adapt.

The problem comes when the amount of stress you’re creating consistently exceeds your ability to recover from it.

In this post, I’m going to go through some of the most common signs of poor recovery, the things that are probably causing it, and how you can adjust your training without feeling like you’re going backwards.

How Do You Know If You’re Not Recovering?

Being tired after a hard training session doesn’t mean you’re under-recovered.

Likewise, having one bad session doesn’t mean you need to sack off training for the week and spend three days lying on the sofa.

We’re looking for patterns.

If your performance has been dropping for several sessions, loads you normally move comfortably suddenly feel heavy, your running pace is getting slower at the same effort, you’re constantly sore, your motivation to train has disappeared or you’re generally feeling more tired and irritable than normal, there’s a good chance fatigue is starting to accumulate.

You might also notice changes in sleep, appetite or your resting heart rate.

None of these things in isolation necessarily mean you have a recovery problem. But when several of them start appearing together and continue for a period of time, it’s probably worth paying attention.

Recovery isn’t about never feeling tired. It’s about being able to recover from the training you’re doing quickly enough to perform again.

Training Stress Isn’t the Only Stress

This is probably one of the biggest things people forget.

Your body doesn’t only have to recover from training.

Work stress, poor sleep, relationships, travelling, calorie restriction, illness, alcohol and everything else going on in your life all contribute to the overall stress you’re dealing with.

You might have been able to comfortably handle six training sessions a week a few months ago when you were sleeping eight hours a night and work was quiet.

Try doing exactly the same program while sleeping five hours, working longer days and spending every weekend out drinking, and you’re probably going to have a very different experience.

The program hasn’t suddenly become bad.

Your ability to recover from it has changed.

This is why recovery has to be looked at in context. Your training exists alongside the rest of your life, not separately from it.

Sleep

If you’re looking for the best recovery tool available, it’s probably sleep.

Not very sexy, unfortunately.

You can spend as much money as you like on saunas, ice baths, compression boots and supplements, but none of them are going to make up for consistently getting five hours of sleep.

Sleep is when a huge amount of physical and neurological recovery takes place. If you’re training hard and repeatedly cutting sleep short, you’re making it harder to recover before you’ve even considered anything else.

I appreciate that telling someone to “just sleep eight hours” isn’t particularly helpful. People have jobs, children and lives outside the gym.

But there are usually things we can control.

Going to bed when you actually have the opportunity. Putting your phone away. Keeping your room cool and dark. Getting light exposure early in the day. Being sensible with caffeine later in the afternoon.

You don’t need perfect sleep. You need to make the most of the sleep opportunities you actually have.

Nutrition

The other big one is nutrition.

If you’re trying to lift heavy, build muscle and improve your running performance, all while deliberately eating significantly less energy than you’re using, eventually something is going to give.

You can absolutely improve performance while losing body fat, particularly if you’re relatively inexperienced. But the leaner, stronger and fitter you become, the more difficult it is to continue pushing everything while sitting in an aggressive calorie deficit.

Carbohydrates are particularly important for hybrid athletes because a lot of the training we do relies heavily on glycogen.

If you’re constantly under-fuelled, your training quality suffers, recovery suffers and the next session starts before you’ve properly recovered from the previous one.

Protein matters. Carbohydrates matter. Total calories matter.

You can’t consistently ask your body to do more while giving it less to do it with.

When Should You Reduce Training Volume?

This is where I think people sometimes get recovery wrong.

The answer to feeling fatigued isn’t always to take a week off.

Sometimes you just need less.

If performance is trending down, soreness isn’t disappearing between sessions and you’re struggling to hit the outputs you normally would, reducing training volume for a period of time can be enough to bring fatigue back under control.

That could mean removing a couple of accessory exercises from your strength training, shortening an easy run, reducing the number of intervals in a conditioning session or dropping one session entirely.

You don’t necessarily need to reduce everything at once.

This is also why I generally prefer adjusting volume before intensity. If we can maintain exposure to heavier lifting or faster running while reducing the total amount of work, we can often maintain the qualities we’ve built while allowing fatigue to come down.

Reducing training volume doesn’t automatically mean losing progress. Sometimes it’s exactly what allows you to keep progressing.

Adjusting Training Without Losing Progress

One of the biggest fears people have when they reduce training is that they’re going to lose everything they’ve built.

You won’t.

Fitness and strength don’t disappear because you had an easier week.

In fact, if you’ve accumulated a lot of fatigue, reducing your training load might actually make you perform better because you’re finally giving your body an opportunity to express the fitness and strength you’ve already developed.

This is why we manipulate volume and intensity throughout the MARCHON Hybrid program rather than trying to do more every single week.

There are periods where we push running volume. There are periods where strength intensity increases. There are periods where bodybuilding volume might be higher. And there are periods where we deliberately pull things back.

The goal is not to maximise how tired we can make you.

The goal is to provide enough training stress to create adaptation, then enough recovery to actually realise it.

Recovery Is Part of the Program

Recovery doesn’t start when you buy a massage gun or jump into an ice bath.

It starts with having a training program you can actually recover from.

Then it comes back to the things we call the world-class basics at MARCHON: eating enough, sleeping as well as you can, managing stress and adjusting your training when your recovery capacity changes.

Recovery tools can absolutely have their place. But they sit on top of those foundations, not underneath them.

If you’re constantly exhausted, sore and watching your performance go backwards, don’t immediately assume you need to train harder.

You might just need to give your body the opportunity to catch up.

See you on the leaderboard,