Ep. 028 - The Underrated Key to Peak Performance: Active Recovery

If you don't actively plan rest and recovery, you'll be forced to take time off and rest at some point, usually in the form of injury or burnout. On this episode, I'm offering you the benefits of planned, active recovery.

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Hello and welcome to episode 28 of man in the Arena. If you're new to this podcast, welcome, and thank you for stopping by. If you've been here before, thank you so much for coming back. Either way, I have a great episode for you today and I think it's super practical and a concept that is really going to change your life. I learned about this concept about 20 years ago and I've adapted it in many different ways to help me level up in my business, in my performance and certainly in my health and my fitness.

One of the tenets of my coaching that is so important that I'm going to talk to you about today is this idea of planned active recoveries. We live in a very fast-paced world and we're taught to work and really apply ourselves as much as we can and grow. Often, what happens is because of this fast-paced world and this striving for excellence and greatness, we often reach plateaus or we often burn out. Our performance starts to go downhill. That's why I really value this idea of planned active recovery. I want to talk about this from two different perspectives.

The first is pretty obvious, and that's your physical recovery. The second is less obvious, but one that I've come across in my personal life and just in my coaching, and that's this idea of psychological recovery. Let's talk about physical recovery first. In order to understand the value of active recovery, you need to understand the concept of periodization.

Periodization from a training perspective is this systematic approach to organizing and structuring a training program so that you can optimize your performance and achieve specific fitness goals. Periodization involves dividing your training cycle up into distinct phases, each with its own focus and objectives. The concept of periodization is commonly used for sports and athletes and that sort of thing, and its primary purpose is to prevent over-training and then enhance performance but also reduce the risk of injury. But in saying that, you don't have to be an Olympic athlete or a high-performing athlete to see the value in this. Often times when guys come to me, they are either inactive they've been sedentary for quite some time or they are active, but they do the same thing over and over again and they don't see any results. They're kind of stagnant. This idea of introducing periodization is really helpful in helping you improve what you're doing.

If you're active right now, I want you to assess your current training regimen, your fitness regimen. If you're running, if you're lifting weights, whatever you're doing, I want you to assess that and say do I have a plan and is it sort of periodized? Is it cut up and divided into different training cycles? That's leading me to an ultimate goal.

Now, if you're just trying to maintain your fitness, that's cool, keep doing what you're doing. But if you want to see changes in your body and in your fitness, I challenge you to take a bit of a different approach. So there's three main components of a periodized training program. These typically include the first one, which is what's called your macro cycle. So this is your overall training plan and this covers an extended period spanning several months or years.

So if you're a 100 meter sprinter, let's say your goal is to make it to the Olympics and then make it to the final, maybe even win. What you would do is you would plan out a four year macro cycle From now until when the final event in the Olympics is. That's the macro cycle. The meso cycle is the second phase and that is sort of this midterm training phase. It's a smaller macro cycle, it's a phase within the macro cycle and this usually lasts several weeks to a few months. So it's kind of that middle phase and each meso cycle has a specific emphasis on building a different aspect of fitness. So we have a meso cycle that might focus on strength or want on power or endurance. Okay, the last cycle is what's called a micro cycle and this is the shortest term training period and it's within the meso cycle Usually lasts, you know, a few weeks, and this is where we actually plan the active recovery. Okay, so, when you think of it, think of okay, in my micro cycle I'm gonna do three weeks of work and then I'm gonna have one week of active recovery and then I would go into my next meso cycle

Three weeks of work and then one week of active recovery. Now, that's just one variation of sort of a cycle. Okay, that's the one that I often use. It's three weeks of work and one week of rest. I like that because it usually matches up pretty well with the calendar and the months and the year. But you can do a whole different range. You can do six weeks of work work versus one week of active recovery. You could do six weeks of work, you know, two weeks of active recovery, it doesn't really matter.

Okay, my best recommendation is to work with a trainer or a coach and get them to help you identify a cycle that works for you and your lifestyle and your schedule. Okay. So what happens with this active recovery is we apply a stimulus, a work stimulus, through, let's say, like I said, that three week phase, that three week work phase, and what happens to your body is your body has to adapt to be able to handle that new stress, that new stimulus.

Okay, so in theory it should be just slightly harder than what your body's capable of doing, okay, and then what happens is we allow the body to recover during that active recovery phase, that one week of rest, and then what we do is we go into the next cycle and now we increase the stimulus even more, just a little bit, and now our body has to adapt to that. But here's the benefit of that active recovery

Usually it's a week, but it could be longer of that active recovery is our body now gets a chance to recover, the muscles recover and we actually see a bit of a detraining effect. So we kind of lose the gains, a little bit of the gains that we had during the work phase. But what happens is when we come back in the next cycle and we apply that even harder stimulus, we see this idea of super compensation, so our body actually gets even stronger and faster and even more fit than it was in the previous phase. Okay, so how I often apply this in my programs that I designed for my clients is, let's say, I was in a hypertrophy phase, so I'm helping my client build muscle and in this particular phase, I have them doing exercises for four sets of 10 reps.

Now, let's say it was a leg press or a squat, where they're doing a hundred pounds for each one of those sets. So a hundred pounds, 10 times for four sets. Now that's during the work phase. When they go into active recovery, they're still going to the gym, so it's not complete rest. They're still doing their warmup and all those different things, but instead of doing four sets of 10, I cut the volume in half. So now I go two sets of five, but I maintain the intensity. So they would still do a hundred pounds.

Okay, the intensity stays the same, but the volume is cut in half. Now you can do this for other elements as well. So say, like you know, your aerobic work, your cardio work. So if I was having a client do a HIIT workout, where they're doing 10 intervals at one minute with a minute of rest. What I would do is I would say okay, now we're going to do five intervals at 30 seconds during the active recovery week.

So the intensity stays the same, they're still working at the same high rate, but their volume is cut in half, and this is enough to help the body maintain the gains that it had during the work phase but also recover at the same time, right? So that's what active recovery looks like from a physical standpoint. It maximizes performance, helps reduce injury and also leads to these kind of peak phases. So if you're training for a marathon, absolutely you want to be using this idea of periodization and incorporating active recovery. You're trying to lose weight. Same thing we don't always want to have the pedal to the metal where eventually we're going to burn out or get injured. Like I said right at the top, if we're not planning our active recoveries and making use of those and getting the benefit of it, we're eventually going to have to stop, and that is because of burnout or injury and we don't want to get to that place.

So something else I've learned in my whole life as I said earlier as a coach working with guys over 40, is this importance of applying this concept to the psychological work we do as well. So I believe that we need to train our minds the same way we train our bodies. So we need to be constantly learning about the world around us and, most importantly, about ourselves. We need to continue to do this work even when we go through school and get into adulthood and become parents. We need to continue to kind of learn about ourselves, train our minds, change our mindsets Right Now. Granted, some people have more learning to do about themselves than others, but either way, the work needs to be done and this work, it should be taxing, it should be challenging, it should cause discomfort, otherwise it's not going to have the impact you need it to have in order to grow.

So, for example, if you have a goal to lose 30 pounds, this goal requires more than just physical effort of exercise and eating less food. If it was that simple, everyone would be able to lose weight and keep it off. So we have to acknowledge that there's this psychological component as well, this mental and emotional component, and you have to learn what your triggers are, why you have certain over-desire for food. In the first place, it means uncovering your limiting beliefs about food or exercise, or changing your relationship with food. So you don't want to overlook the importance of this psychological component and, as a result, you're going to put forward this effort to read and learn and do thought work and process emotions. And so, as I said in previous episodes, this requires a certain capacity and when you plan this correctly, with planned phases of active recovery, you can build a greater capacity to do this work and avoid the burnout that often comes with it.

So the theory is the same as the physical side. You have a period of work followed by a period of rest, and it's planned, it's intentional. You decide ahead of time. So, instead of always putting your pedal to the floor and doing the work, you take some time off and you let it integrate, and then you repeat this with maybe a higher level of stimulus or work to be done. Okay, so I recently had a client implement this practice, and here's what it looked like.

So during the work phase, he was really disciplined with his thought work. He was showing up to his coaching calls, he was journaling. Every night, he was looking at the thoughts that he was having that led him to overeating and, in this case, judging himself. Okay, so with this reflection, he also planned his meals, he set goals daily and after a few weeks of this, we planned an active recovery where he allowed himself to step back from the journaling and setting goals and he was less intentional every day.

This was on purpose, right. It allowed him to focus his attention on other things and, most importantly, he didn't have this guilty feeling about not doing the work. Okay, then one week later, he went back to journaling and doing the things he was doing the previous week and you know, learning new things, applying new concepts that I was coaching him through. And in this process of work followed by active recovery, he gained new insights, he was able to build capacity and he saw even more value in this process and in this practice.

So here are some key best practices to consider if you're going to do active recovery all right, whether it's through the physical side or the psychological side or both. So, most importantly, you need to have a plan. You need to have a plan outlining again those macro cycles, meso cycles, micro cycles, and you need to know when your work time is going to be and when your recovery time is going to be right. You need to plan this ahead of time, now, when you come up to an active recovery week. You might not feel like you actually need it, but I want you to follow through anyway, and in fact, the more that I integrate this in my coaching and with my clients, they actually say, hey, the active recovery weeks are seemingly perfectly timed. Whenever they arrive right, either the client is feeling a little bit run down or their work is just set up in a certain way, and so it just really comes at a valuable time. We'll start to see the value in that as well.

Second thing is you have to have an active recovery exit strategy. In other words, you have to know what the next work phase is going to look like when you're done your active recovery. So instead of just kind of taking your active recovery week, you want to make sure that you also set up the next phase, so you hit the ground running and you can move right into the next sort of work phase.

Next thing you want to do is assess how you're feeling as a result of these active recoveries. So you want to kind of keep track of your mood, of your energy, so that you can accurately determine the impact that these recoveries are having on you. So, as I mentioned earlier, I believe so deeply in this concept of planning, first or foremost looking ahead of time and then building in these phases of active recovery and notice how it's active recovery, so it's not like you take complete rest. Now there are times when you need to take complete rest where you do not have workouts planned, where you do not have any sort of psychological work that you're doing, and athletes do this in their planning. They have periods of complete rest. So, for example, you know, after the Olympics you've peaked, your performance has over. Now you take complete rest. So this might look like a vacation just time away and you're not really doing anything but active recovery. The key there is active. You're still doing something. You're still doing it at a high intensity. The volume is just reduced.

Okay, that's all I have for you guys today. I hope you really found this concept and this episode valuable. This is something I do in my life and I encourage you to do it in your own. Thank you so much for listening today. I look forward to next week and, in the meantime, keep leading a legacy of good health and longevity.