Rest Days and Recovery Runs: What You Need to Know
How and why to incorporate rest and recovery into your training
Take planned rest days when you are healthy, or you will be taking forced rest days when you are injured.
Injuries are the Trojan Horses of trail running. Like in the city of Troy, everything in your body can seem fine, until things suddenly become very, very bad. And in both scenarios, without vigilance, things will not end well for any Achilles involved.
While hard training is a prerequisite to create elite athletes, adequate recovery is essential to keep them from destroying themselves through injury and physiological breakdown.
Breakdown and Recovery
First, the basics: Running training causes breakdown everywhere. Train hard more than a few days in a row and the breakdown will build until performance falls off a cliff and training becomes actively counterproductive. Overtraining and overuse injuries are the result.
The Role of Impact Forces
Why is running different? Unlike endurance sports like cycling or swimming, running involves impact forces. These impact forces increase breakdown, thus decreasing the total amount of work you can do before getting injured. That is why top runners train at most 14 hours per week, while the top cyclists and swimmers can train twice as much. (Don’t even get me started on how much triathletes can train.)
Impact forces are the reason rest days are important for most runners. Rest days—when used strategically over the course of a training cycle—can heal budding injuries before you even know they exist.
Using Rest and Recovery Days
Recovery Run Frequency: The frequency of recovery runs depends on how much you are running to begin with. I recommend doing at least four or five total runs a week no matter what your level. Spreading out your total distance over the course of a week decreases injury risk and allows your body to stay adapted to the impact forces.
Rest Day Frequency: Here things go from a science to an art. Some runners can get by without ever taking a rest day. However, if you are reading this article for training advice, then you are unlikely to fall into the never-rest, never-injured category.
For less experienced or injury-prone runners, two rest days a week might be needed. Another option is to replace one of those rest days with a “shuffle”—a run that minimizes impact forces by being deliberately slow (at least two minutes per mile slower than marathon pace).
Any more than two rest days per week is generally not advisable unless you are new to running, a multi-sport athlete or over 50 years old—packing too much mileage into too few runs can increase injury risk. Focus on frequency and consistency for long-term success.
On rest days, don’t vegetate like a human eggplant. Instead, walk around, foam roll, do some strength and mobility work (though no leg weight-lifting), and spin on the bike if you want. Just be sure to avoid impact forces (that includes things like CrossFit, tennis and jumping up and down on the bed).
Remember the importance of rest days, and you can make recovery (and your running performance) great again.
To read the full article click here. Original article written by David Roche - a two-time USATF trail national champion, the 2014 U.S. Sub-Ultra Trail Runner of the Year and a member of Nike Trail Elite and Team Clif Bar. He works with runners of all abilities through his coaching service, Some Work, All Play.