The Stress/Recovery Response: Adjusting your training

You have probably heard something to the likes of, “It’s not the work you put in, but the recovery from the work that makes you faster.” That’s a gross paraphrase, but the point is that if you are putting in these monster workouts but not recovering, then you’ll miss out on the adaptations that really make you a faster runner. However, I don’t think it’s a situation where all I need to do is recover, right? If you use the excuse of taking two days off from an easy 30-minute run (assuming you aren’t a beginner), then that probably defeats the purpose. You have to think of it as a cycle- yes, I want to put the work in, but the recovery should match the amount of work you put in. And, the recovery for each area of work might look different. So, in this post, let’s explore the idea of the stress response cycle and what that looks like for you. 

Historically, and I even wrote about it before, the Supercompensation model of stress, response, and recovery dominated the theory on spacing workouts apart. If you aren’t familiar, take a look at the photo below. 

A generalization of the supercompensation model is that the longer, or more intense, a workout is, the longer you will need to recover from that workout. Immediately following the workout, you will be more fatigued, and performance will be impaired. Over time, this rebounds and “supercompensates” before peaking and then trailing off to baseline. If you do a workout too soon, you gradually decline in fitness by increasing fatigue so much that you reach a breaking point. If you wait too long, you eventually return to your original baseline (maybe even dip below) and fitness stagnates. So, obviously, what we want to do is to stack workouts at a rate where each one builds upon the last one. In general, I think this is a good model to follow, but it is based on the idea of glycogen depletion being the driving factor. It is a factor, but it’s definitely not the only thing. This is the premise of the hard/easy principle- or one hard day is followed by an easy day. 

What you are seeing more and more of is the Fitness-Fatigue Model. This is where you are seeing the crazy readouts from Garmin and the Fitness score on Strava. If you know terms like Training Stress Score (TSS), Acute Training Load (ATL), and Chronic Training Load (CTL), then you are seeing versions of these represented as numbers or recovery time, etc. You basically have a fitness baseline affected by two outcomes. One is the positive influence of fitness vs the negative influence of fatigue. The general idea is fatigue can be generated in great amounts, but it goes away relatively quickly, so much so that fitness declines three times slower than the rate of fatigue. 

To me, the commonality between the two models is that athletes don’t need to be fully recovered between training bouts. However, the question remains- how much is enough? How do we find that Goldilocks of workout frequency? 

I think the big thing to consider is what you are training for. If you know me, I talk about Kevin and Keith Hanson’s idea of Cumulative Fatigue all the time. However, this is specifically for the marathon, and maybe a little for the half marathon. Why? Because it is race-specific and we want to only be in this stage the last few weeks (before) the taper. If you are experiencing what people will wrongly call CF during the first few weeks of training, then they are just overtraining. They are doing too much too fast, and it’s not sustainable. I will be the first to admit that this model is not a good fit for 5k/10k up to the half marathon for certain people. We can get away with it in the longer races because the intensity is much lower. That’s not the case for the shorter stuff. You have to be more recovered to handle the intensity. 

That’s probably the biggest issue I see with athletes, especially those new to HMM style of training. They get suckered into people talking about it being lower volume because of the long run and the intensity isn’t as much, so they go too hard too early. It takes its toll too soon.

My recommendations: 

1. When in doubt, spread it out. If you are new to a system, then there is going to be a learning curve. Give yourself some grace between workouts, but learn what you recover faster from and what takes more out of you. Adjust your plan accordingly. For example, many of my athletes start to struggle with Speed on Tuesday, and off day, then a Tempo on Thursday. For many of them, it’s not enough recovery time, and then the wheels start falling off6-8 weeks later. However, since the book says Tuesday and Thursday, they keep pressing on. There’s nothing in the book that says they have to go Tues/Thursday. Don’t be afraid to adjust! 
2. It seems counterproductive, but don’t expect every workout to be faster and better. You see so many “influencers” only showing you the great workouts they did, but I’m telling you, most of your workouts are/should be average at best. We get caught up in this idea that everything has to be great every time or we aren’t making progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. 
3. Don’t worry about supplements and marginal gain products if you aren’t nailing the basics first. Basics mean fueling and hydration. While the supercompensation model may not paint the complete picture, it provides a lot of detail into what can speed recovery. If you aren’t providing your body with what it needs for fuel and to repair damage, then the other stuff is window dressing. Get comfortable with taking fuel in before, during, and after workouts. And in volumes higher than you probably think. 
4. Don’t get too caught up in metrics. In fact, most metrics, I wouldn’t even look at while running. I have athletes emailing me about all kinds of crazy stuff, and it just takes all the joy out of running. I think measuring stuff is fine, but don’t obsess over it. A lot of those things are great to look at over time and look for trends, but to be looking at real-time data during my run is just complete overkill. Even more so, learn how to gauge effort by how you feel and then use that data to correlate. So, if something feels off to you, then you later look, and some of your data is wonky, then you don’t need to observe the data in real time, but rather gauge your effort and how you feel and manage it. 
5. Forget about zones. If you are managing efforts and learning how to pace yourself, just take another thing to monitor out of the equation. If you follow what I am teaching you, all that stuff will take care of itself. We have become a population that’s so worried about optimization that they never teach themselves how to just do something because it didn’t fit in the algorithm, 

I think if you do those 5 things, you’ll find yourself in a much better position. What I really want you to take away from this is that stress/recovery responses have evolved a bit. Old models don’t tell the whole story, perhaps. However, they should not be tossed aside. New methods collect a lot of data and put a lot more science into it, but to me, they take away the idea that you don’t have to do something if your data says you are off. Sorry, but that’s life! Some days just suck, but you show up anyway. Maybe it doesn’t look exactly what it was supposed to look. However, we get to the point where we push stuff off because the data says we should. I am a firm believer in the idea that we race how we train. So if we are always just going by what the data says, we never learn what we can do if we are not in optimal capacity. Per most things in life- a little balance and moderation will do wonders. 

Given all that, I don’t want this to come across as you should just be reckless in training and cram 3-4 workouts in during a week. So, here are some basic guidelines for different types of workouts to consider during your training setup. 

Easy Runs: 0-24 hours.

Long Runs: 48-72 hours.

Tempo & Threshold Runs: 48-72 hours.

VO2 Max Intervals: 36-48 hours.

Short Anaerobic Speed/Hill Sprints: 48-72 hours.

These are a good place to start. I’d say if you are new to something, or you aren’t very good at something, then expect the longer side of the time range. For example, most of my athletes come to me with great endurance and tempo abilities. They recover very quickly from them. However, if I can convince them to do some speed segments, we have to be really careful because most will struggle with anything at 5k pace or faster. Then you really have to play around with the volume of the workout, the length of the repeats, and the time between the next one. For example, I might have them actually do a shorter long run a few days after a true speed workout. This actually helps them recover better before doing something like an LT workout on the weekend. They might do three SOS days for the week, but it would be 4-5 days between anything at LT and faster. 

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