What's the best form of recovery?

Take home message

BEST RECOVERY METHODS?
HARD TRAINING, ADEQUATE SLEEP, FIRST RATE NUTRITION.

For Coaches

Put the blocks in the right order by effect. Educate your athletes and coaches on sound methods.

For Athletes

Simple may not appear sophisticated or worth posting. But it works.

In my humble opinion, potentially one of the most over-discussed components of performance is recovery. There is such an emphasis on recovery - technologies, modalities, facilities, protocols. They work, are clearly important, but it feels sometimes that training programs are structured around recovery instead of the other way. First things first, you have to have something worth recovering from.

So what do I consider the best form of recovery? First and foremost, it is being better prepared. As relatively unsophisticated and simple as that sounds, if an athlete is well trained they have a larger tank to draw on for a given task, meaning less is expended to do the task. Training or competition does not cost as much for the better prepared athlete, and their recovery capacity is generally better too. Make sure your training is worth recovering from.

This is nice. But it is not always like this.

In my opinion, I then tend to rank recovery options in order of how long a person could go if the aspect was completely unavailable:
Athlete: “What is the best recovery?”
Me: “How many days can you go without ice baths?”
Athlete: (weird look) “Like, forever.”
Me: “How many days can you go without drinking, eating and sleeping?” There’s your answer.

Sometimes it is this.

I rank the big rocks first. For example, the vast majority of recovery modalities have some level of evidence, but none sit as high as sleep and nutrition. If an athlete is not getting at least 8 hours of sleep, or chooses to eat (or drink) poorly, it doesn’t matter how long they sit in the ice bath and how many compression garments they put on.

Some players choose to travel wearing compression garments. All travel with a water bottle. I encourage an active cool down post training and offer the athletes a range of choice and personal flexibility with respect to their needs on stretching, rolling, triggering, small injury prevention exercises after sessions or at the gym, ice baths and compression garments after matches. And whilst my athletes know I say “everything is a choice”, I probably have that ‘look’ they recognise as this time is not really a choice, when I ask where their drink and protein shakes are post-match. As a team, we ensure the next day’s schedule starts late enough to allow sufficient time to sleep-in (usually our games finish late in the evening).

We also train hard - very hard, so that we can endure competitive matches and tournaments.

But it’s been like this more times than I care to remember!

Another issue I’ve encountered with recovery is that “best practice” is not always available. Depending on the location of the match or tournament, facilities can be not what players are used too. If we have placed too much emphasis on lesser details (the temperature of the ice bath or recovery boots) and they are not available, players can be anxious about changes to their performance routines. Heightened anxiety won’t help recovery. Some post match injuries (skin abrasions, stitches, etc) prohibit use of ice baths. Plus, sometimes the variety of facilities available in hockey has been quite… unique. From the quality of the water, or ice to the “baths”, these can make normal routines problematic.

I have tried to place an emphasis on solid physical preparation before entering the tournament (confidence of “money in the bank”) and sound recovery habits that are in our control in the tournament setting: sleep, hydration, nutrition, stretching and injury risk management exercises with minimal equipment. Then if the ice baths are available, bonus. If there is a pool, fantastic. A decent gym, excellent. But it does not stress the players if these things are not to our usual standards, or even available. We have addressed the major components.

Ignore the gimmicks and Instagram fads. Like a lot in physical preparation, the best methods are often the most simple.