Post-exercise recovery: it’s all in the mind!

When it comes to maximizing recovery, the focus has always been on finding and implementing more effective training interventions. Most athletes and coaches want to know the most effective training strategies, they want to know the best way to implement these strategies, and they want to know how to organize different training activities into weekly, monthly, and even yearly training plans.

However, training is only one half of the improvement process. To make progress, athletes need to train hard and then recover from that training in order to gain the adaptations they are seeking. In recent years, more and more attention has been given the recovery side of the improvement equation. That makes sense because at some point, athletes can’t train harder, longer, or better, so they need to find ways to recover more effectively.

Intelligent recovery

The most powerful strategy for facilitating effective recovery is the development of intelligent training plans. Rather than training at maximal intensity and maximal volume every single day, effective training plans alternate between training days of higher and lower stress, a concept often extended to implementing weeks or even months of higher and lower training stress. For many, there are even different times of year where training stress is elevated relative to others. The baseline for effective recovery therefore is sound training.

Beyond the focus on building more recovery into training plans, many coaches and athletes aim to further accelerate recovery in order to enhance the adaptation athletes experience, allowing them to train harder, sooner. To do so, they often rely on external interventions where a physical stimulus is presented to the body, such as ice baths, massage, or foam rolling.

Internal recovery

While these external recovery interventions can be effective, they largely ignore the internal state of stress within the body, which strongly governs recovery.  During intense physical activity, the sympathetic nervous system provides the hormonal environment to allow for large physiological outputs. When it’s time to train and compete, this is the state you want your body to be in.

However, this is not a physiological state conducive to recovery. By contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for promoting a psychological state that allows for the body to rest and repair itself. This is a calmer state where recovery rather than performance is emphasized. It follows therefore that after training, if an athlete is unable to reduce the input of the sympathetic nervous system, and increase the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, they’ll struggle to recover.

Mindfulness and recovery

In recent years, there’s been a growing interest in mindfulness activities because of their ability to reduce stress, perhaps by influencing the nervous system to tone down the sympathetic input and increase the parasympathetic input. While these interventions have generally been applied outside of the context of sport, researchers believe it’s possible that mindfulness interventions may help athletes shift their physiological state toward one associated with better recovery.

In particular, as training sessions result in intense physiological activation, it’s possible that performing a simple mindfulness routine following training may help athletes shift from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state more quickly and more completely. If so, that could kick start the recovery process from an internal perspective rather than an external perspective. But does this approach work? Fortunately, a research group from the United States has carried out new research to try and answer this exact question.