Rating Recovery for Elite Athletes

 

by Rebecca Roberts 04.11.10

Whilst many athletes and sports have their traditions for the optimum recovery techniques, understanding the true value of strategies used in training and competition is essential to harnessing the edge over competition.

English Institute of Sport (EIS) Physiologist Jonathan Leeder has undertaken his PhD on this very area, at Northumbria University, taking a deeper look into just what makes the best recovery for top flight athletes.

“Recovery strategies are designed to decrease the stress of exercise so that you recover faster” says Leeder.

“There are many different techniques which can be adopted but understanding what benefits and where they should be applied, if at all, is a crucial aspect of my research” he adds.

Due to be published early next year, Leeder’s findings will contribute to the understanding of recovery strategies and their use within training and competition, as deployed by those working with the EIS across its High Performance Centres.

“Compression garments are often used by athletes and we found that whilst they had an impact on how an athlete feels, they don’t contribute to muscle recovery. However, whether a placebo effect or not, during competition, anything that makes an athlete feel better is advantageous, so they still can play their part in some situations” says Leeder.

When it came to ice baths and contrast baths, Leeder says that existing evidence combined suggests there are beneficial properties of using them in recovery.

"Evidence suggests that ice baths reduce muscle soreness after exercise and that the effects on muscle function is specific to the exercise" Leeder says. 

“So for example, gym based work with physical strain versus metabolic work where the heart rate is up for a prolonged period. Ice baths prove more effective for metabolic work than gym work. If used for gym work regularly, they may make athletes feel better but the muscles won’t have recovered any better than they would have if they hadn’t used one.”

Competition scenarios however offer different demands on athletes’ recovery than the training environment, something which is critical to the information gathered from this research says Leeder.

“In competition scenarios ice baths are beneficial because athletes are required to perform again in close succession so their recovery needs to be fast.

“There’s evidence to suggest that if you constantly decrease the stress in training that the body won’t adapt, so long term use of a recovery technique, such as an ice bath, should be reviewed to avoid any detrimental effects on performance and to ensure that these techniques have their biggest impact when needed during competition" he adds.

The key components to the best recovery? According to his research Leeder believes the basics cannot be underestimated.

“Elite athletes need to be on top of aspects such as sleeping, warming down and eating well” he explains.

“If athletes are not sleeping well they won’t be able to tolerate the level of training they need. EIS research has found that athletes don’t sleep as well as the average person and that’s down to not only the physical demands they’re put through but also the psychological ones.

Recovery shows perhaps the biggest value of a breadth of sport science and medical expertise available to athletes, from techniques such as ‘sleep hygiene’ from performance psychologists, to nutritional support and medical care, as well as the physiological understanding of the limits of the human body.