Tips for Carhartt WIP effective rest and recovery after cycling

There’s no denying it — the time spent off the bike recovering is as vital to an athlete as the time spent training. If you miss the opportunity to repair muscle damage, you can be left with more than just aching legs.

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So it is no surprise that scientists have been trying for decades to improve the process of recovery and reduce the soreness, injury and fatigue that result from training. Yet wading through the different research that has been produced can be baffling, contradictory and can lead to you making wrong decisions about your own training and recovery.

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It is with good reason that recovery has increasingly been the focus of science in sport. Professional cyclist Liam Holohan explains: “It’s the most important bit of training. So many guys go over the top with the training and just don’t recover from it — their form gets worse and it’s a vicious circle. They think they’re doing badly so they train harder and it only makes it worse.”

Worse still, failing to recover can cause and aggravate injury. Ken Matheson, former national road coach for the British team, explains that “muscles don’t behave normally when they’re tired; it’s not just the muscles themselves but fatigue in the central nervous system and the necessary neural responses. If you’re tired you’re maybe not controlling your knee so well, or the location of your foot. Things are not quite working and you end up with an injury because of it.”

Overtraining and injury aren’t just limited to the elite either. The reality is that those fitting training around an ordinary lifestyle are most susceptible. “Some people feel compelled to just train and train and train and they just become more and more ill. A lot of people underestimate the need for recovery and the power of recovery,” says Matheson. Chances are, if you are a competitive cyclist and a busy professional, you’ve already experienced more than one symptom of overtraining.

Fact or fad?

So, how can we speed the process of recovery? There are many tricks that people use in approaching recovery, in an attempt to speed the process and reduce pain, but many have proved to be ineffective. For instance, many think that stretching after a training session can reduce muscle damage and soreness. Unfortunately, though, studies suggest your muscles won’t be spared simply by holding a position for 15 seconds after a difficult session, as stretching has little or no effect on short-term muscle soreness.

That’s not to say that cyclists shouldn’t make stretching a regular part of their training routine. In the long term, flexibility training (prolonged stretching over time) has been shown to reduce the amount of tearing that occurs during intense training, according to a study in the American journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise..

Ice baths have also been a highly publicised technique used by the ultra-competitive. Yet, the majority of the studies contest any benefit of their use. A 2007 paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that ice baths actually hindered recovery, while some recent papers suggest a small benefit after sprint training. Immersing yourself in a cold bath (around room temperature) and contrasting this with hot water has produced much better results.

Another popular method of reducing muscle soreness and speeding recovery is active recovery, replacing rest time with light exercise. While the science often supports it, active recovery has its drawbacks.

Matheson warns: “Once you raise your pulse, you raise your metabolic rate and once you raise your metabolic rate you’re not creating the new proteins or the adaptation that your training has pushed you to achieve. The adaptations that you would get from recovery aren’t taking place.’ So while a gentle warm-down is a good idea, replacing valid rest time with more exercise can prove problematic.