What's up, Motivators Taren here today we're going to talk about the three best
ways that I find athletes can monitor their recovery levels.
The goal of all of your training is to push as hard as you can while stopping
right before the point at which you stop absorbing all of your training.
You want to be on that nice upward curve where all of your time is really useful
and before you hit the point of diminishing returns.
How you do that is by monitoring your recovery levels.
And today we are going to give you
the system for what we like athletes to use so they can get into that nice
meaty part of the curve where every hour you spend as a triathlete, a runner,
a cyclist, whatever it might be, actually generating results.
My name is Terry Gazelle.
In my twenties, I was overweight.
Unfulfilled and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports, lost £65,
won age groups, race world Championships, broke records and trained and learned
from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You too, can use endurance sports
to change your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system, a system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Mottiv,
offers that system and I want to share some of the tips from it today.
Let's dive into it.
What I'm going to give you here are three
methods that you can use to start monitoring your recovery levels.
They're in order of probably the most structured, but maybe least effective
to the most subjective, but probably the most effective.
So what I like to do is say use these in order, and as you start going through
them in this order, you can start transferring method number
one into method number two and method number two into method number three.
And as you're doing that, you are learning what good recovery feels
like, what a little bit too much feels like, so that you can start making
that more subjective but really effective method that we're going to talk about
at the end a little bit more quantifiable so that you can identify what the signs
are of doing a little bit too much, or when you can push a little bit more.
The first method that is really
quantifiable but well needs to be paired with other measures is HRV.
There's a link in the description below to a free HRV monitoring spreadsheet
that we use because things like Whoop aura HRV for training the app on your phone.
They are very good for getting you an HRV reading.
But how do you actually interpret that?
Well, that's where I recommend using this spreadsheet.
Here what you get when you download that for free, just by putting in your
email address is a spreadsheet that is made for you.
That all you have to do is put in your HRV reading every single day.
And after about 30 days, what it does is it calculates your 30 day
rolling average of your HRV versus your seven day rolling average.
It's comparing your most recent training,
what is happening in your body over the last several days versus what
the recent trends are, what's your global training,
what you're looking for is you want this spreadsheet to stay green.
It's not always going to stay green,
but when it hits red and when that seven day average dips under the 30 day average
like it does here in moments, that means that your acute training load,
what you are going through right at the moment is imbalanced.
It's maybe due to having a couple of bottles of wine or maybe you stepped up
the training too much, or maybe you're stressed out.
What I like about HRV is it's a little bit
of a leading indicator where it will tell you what's kind of coming up in the four
to 14 day period if you keep going down this path.
So the actual number,
the reading that you get versus what somebody else gets doesn't really matter.
It's what you are doing right now versus what you typically do.
Why this is nice is because it gives you
an indication of how much is too much, how little is too little,
what you can appropriately handle and it will account for all of the life stresses,
all of the poor sleep, all of the things on a global level.
And if you start having these moments
where you dip under your 30 day rolling average, you can look back and go, oh,
okay, maybe I should be aware of those things that are popping up.
That said, there are times that HRV can be
a little bit off, definitely on a day to day basis,
which is why we use a seven day average over a 30 day average.
I've almost always found that it's about 80% to 90% accurate.
But what are some other methods that you can know, boom,
instantly on a day that maybe you need a little bit of extra rest?
Well, for that, there's this study again link is in the description below that just
simply looked at overtraining syndrome and it went and looked at a bunch
of relevant studies, put them all together and looked at what were some
of the biggest indicators of an overtraining situation popping up?
One of the biggest indicators was sore muscles.
And you might think, hey, aren't sore muscles the point?
Not really.
Typically, sore muscles are an indication
that you did too much for your body to actually repair itself very quickly.
And endurance athletes, we back up day after day after day after day.
We don't want to come into a session or
a workout feeling a little bit sluggish, a little bit overtrained,
and then having to loosen our way up and get through some sore muscles.
We want to boom, get right at it.
And when we can boom, get right at it,
that means that every single session is going to be absorbed a lot better.
We're still in that upward curve and not in the diminishing returns point where
additional hours isn't really giving you any more benefit.
So if you have sore muscles one day, I wouldn't worry about it.
If you have sore muscles continuously over
the course of a few weeks and you see, Holy smokes, over the course of the last
four weeks, I've had sore muscles three, four times.
That's probably an indication that your training balance isn't correct.
Either your life stress is too high or
your training stress is too high and you need to bring one of them down.
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The third thing is low motivation.
This is a tricky one because there are
times where low motivation is literally just part of the training process and it's
something that you have to just suck it up and get through.
But there's a lot of times that low motivation is actually a tool and your
brain is telling you, hey, this is a little bit too much.
Let's bring it back down a little bit.
The problem is that just about every
endurance athlete, when they experience low motivation,
thinks that they are in the first camp where it's just something that they have
to go and get the I'm Tougher Than Low Motivation badge.
And that's just not the case.
Use that motivation as a tool to make sure you're still in the upward trajectory
and you're not just spending time training for the sake of training.
Training more hours past the point of low Motivation when it's a tool that is
telling us to back off a little bit, is literally just training more hours.
It's not doing anything to make you any faster, make you any healthier.
You are just spinning your wheels.
You want to stay in that nice upward trajectory.
And low motivation is occasionally
something that we should listen to, but because it's so subjective,
I went looking for a system for how to use motivation that you could employ,
and I actually found a friend of mine who is a coach, an author really smart
individual, Nick Buska, who has written about low motivation
and how he employs a system for his athletes to determine whether they are
part of low motivation type one or low motivation type two.
There's a link to Nick's article about low motivation in his system.
You can go read it in the description below.
But generally you use these three methods,
and then I want you to look at each of these three methods.
Whether your HRV has dipped under the 30 day average, if you have several days
of sore muscles in the last month, if you have several days of low motivation
in the last month, and then pair that with these six questions.
First, do you feel wired and tired like you're tired, but you have a hard time
getting to sleep, particularly for a nap in the afternoon?
Second, do you have difficulty sleeping
at night, getting to sleep, or staying asleep?
Third, have you averaged less than seven
and a half hours sleep over the last several months?
Fourth, is your life stress quite high?
Fifth, is your training stress abnormally high, like you're in a big block?
And six, when you take rest from train, you actually feel worse.
If your answer is yes to, I'd say two or more of these questions
and you've seen your HRV dip or your muscles get sore or your motivation be
low, you are almost definitely in that point of diminishing returns.
In this case, as a first step.
What I like to do is assign three days of nothing but completely light training.
Like very, very light,
like end every single workout feeling guilty for how little you did.
This might be a 30 minutes bike,
or a commute to and from work, or a totally easy 10 meter swim where it
just feels like you warmed up, but just keep it very light.
Hopefully that snaps you out of it, lets you recover a little bit.
But if this instance happens twice or more
within a three month period, then it's an indication that your overall
training stress is too high and your overall life stress is too high.
And one of those things needs to be readjusted.
It just does because you're not doing any
favors for your performance or your health.
Parting word. What I will say is because endurance
athletes are very guilty of always thinking more is more, more is better.
Well, I can tell you that studies have shown that even at the level of an Ironman
distance athlete, less than 12 hours a week has actually
been shown for the average age grouper to produce some of the best performances
out there, comparable to 22 hours weeks of training.
So trust me, training a little bit less and bringing your balance into a little
bit more of an appropriate level isn't going to hurt your performance.
If anything, it might be better for your performance because you're better rested.
We want you 100% healthy, 98% trained.
That is way better than 98% healthy and 100% trained.
Thank you for watching motivators if you're looking for a training plan
that incorporates these methods that is as good as a one on one coach but as
inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our Motive Training app
that covers triathlons, running races, dothlon swim runs, and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free.
Also, if you rather listen to these tips, we also publish these videos in podcast
format that on the Terrans Motive Method podcast so you can check that out.
And if you don't want to do either
of those things that you found, this video helpful hit us up
with a virtual high five by smashing the like button below later motivated.