Recovery Week

So this week is my RECOVERY WEEK. After 3 intense week of training i always take a full week to recover. In the last 3 weeks i ran over 360km + 6x 1H Strength Weight Training + 3 Yoga Classes. During my recovery week i still workout 5x a week but less intense and less miles.This week ill be doing in total 50-70k, 2 Yoga Classes and 2 Strength Training. Let me explain to you the importance of recovery week:

To optimise your running, you need to find the ideal balance between running and recovery.

Hans Selye, a Canadian physiologist, stated that if you stress a body and let it recover, its performance will be enhanced. Miss out on the recovery, and it will become exhausted. An athlete may withstand a relatively great load of a particular exercise for which he or she has been trained, but more easily succumbs to other stressing agents such as colds and bacterial infections than the normal healthy person. A number of hard training weeks require a recovery week to allow supercompensation and improvement. Even if you have a hard day/easy day schedule, although energy levels will recover, muscle tissue repair will not. The ideal pattern is generally 3 hard weeks followed by an easy week. In summary, to ensure that you are optimizing your training from the point of adaptation, go for 3 weeks hard/1 week easy and also have a couple of recovery periods throughout the year, say of 3 weeks duration each. The effort you put into your running is too important to devalue by not giving yourself sufficient recovery.