 that's right is episode number 109 of the school of calisthenics podcast and today we're talking about all things related to fatigue recovery and the perils of overtraining there's no guest it's just jack and i delving into a little bit of knowledge and some research we've done to bring some fresh ideas to the table and we hope this one has got a big impact on your training yeah hopefully there's a lot of takeaways for you but just before we get into the podcast wanted to let you know because they're going out pretty fast is workshops for 2020 and retreats there is a ton of those on the website now we've got stuff in the UK we've got islands Scotland we've got Norway we're into Europe we've got a retreat in Sri Lanka and retreat in the UK that's just been announced there is as it stands today at recording the UK retreat has only got three spaces left it's quite intimate affairs in the eight totals only three left and there is five of the 12 spaces in Sri Lanka available as we record now so it's two weeks ahead so there may have been less when you log on but go and check if you are interested come into a workshop learning about and training with us or what's going on the retreats go at schoolofcalisthenics.com check out the website obviously after you've listened to the the amazing podcast and look up workshops and or retreats i think the phrase jacko is hot potato hot so hot cake they're going like hot cake while you more which hot potato you want to kind of get a hold of these hot cakes in it whichever cakes or potatoes whether your preference sit back enjoy this podcast me and jacko tell me what's next on the school of calisthenics podcast roll the jingle so who tim uh exciting day um not just because of what we're going to be talking about in terms of uh overtraining fatigue and how to overcome those with recovery strategies but this is the first podcast we're doing live as part uh for the vrp members of the virtual classroom so you may get interrupted not just by me but some questions coming in from the live listeners it's a new initiative it's safe to say that we don't exactly know how the engagement and interaction is going to work but we are rolling with it i'm super excited when we get guests on people are actually going to be able to come on and ask their questions direct to the esteemed professionals and experts that we have on our podcast and then they can also ask me a new if they want probably yeah but they'll probably yeah they'll probably go for the the big cheese guest that we're going to get i would if that was me so yeah that's for that's for the vip members in the virtual classroom so hello to all of you that are listening um and if you have questions and then put them in the chat box and we'll be able to get to those through the podcast but so moving on to today's important subject we're excited about this one yeah it's it's both it's important both um and and you're excited about it because it's a topic that probably there's a lot of discussion around we get asked questions about this all the time it can be can be a lifesaver literally or and or can make a huge difference to our training and something that everyone probably battles with to some degree and it is the concept of overtraining what that is and what what sort of fatigue is and obviously you're going to delve into the depths of that and then we're going to look at the recovery strategies and so i guess review some of those I guess and um and give you listeners at home as much take home advice um for your recovery strategies to try and help you recover better and then ultimately like make more progress and I just want to say at the start just because we're going to talk about overtraining doesn't mean that these recovery strategies aren't going to be useful and helpful for everybody you don't have to wait until you're absolutely maxed out and hitting all these markers of overtraining to decide to take some of these recovery strategies on board yeah which is exactly the point isn't it we'll dive into that as we go through I think that's just um probably needs to put a little bit of context around it set the scene because this could be one of the most significant parts of additions or tweaks to your training program if you're training to a certain level and consistency and frequency um if you are sort of like only sort of dabbing in and out of training once a week or every now and again then it's probably not going to be such a big issue but as a training scales these are really important things to take on board now there's just a couple of things Jaco and I want you to get your just your thoughts on this one when it comes to overtraining there is a little bit of confusion around the internet I I'm going to quote C.T. Fletchix I think it was him who says that it doesn't exist so if you ever see any of that sort of like rhetoric around there is no such things overtraining it's not true I've met people and seen people in sport who have hit overtraining and it's not a good place to be and we'll talk about that in a bit more detail I'm sure there's some scientific literature on and people defining not only testing but also defining what that yeah the context that I'm expecting I think C.T. Fletchix is referring to is that most people don't actually train hard enough yeah is the biggest thing but we know that from the people that have engaged with us the questions we get around this then yeah there are people that are starting to kind of verge on that level but the reality is that overtraining is a very difficult thing for most people to hit who are non-professional athletes because at some point or another something gets in the way which means we take an enforced rest which could be injury unfortunately for some people and that could be one of the signs of kind of pushing a bit too hard but it also could be just like a holiday or work travel or family life or something like that and Mike Boyle who's a strength and condition coach with an incredible amount of experience a guy that I've followed throughout my career and I've got a lot of love respect for it doesn't necessarily worry too much about delo weeks this idea of taking scheduled gaps within a training program or within a block of training because he says often the athletes will get that anyway they've got a dentist appointment or they've got a media appointment or something like that which means that they miss some level of training but this idea of what we're essentially reaching into is going we're going to train we're going to create a level of fatigue as a result of training which is an important byproduct because that stress and fatigue is going to be what causes an adaptation down the line if we continue to create lots of stress and lots of fatigue we get into a point where recovery becomes really important and if we go too far down that rabbit hole we can get into this realm of what is known as overtraining and just to give a bit of definition on that one pull this out of the essentials of strengthening conditioning David to give a little bit of a academic flavour flavour that's the right word so excessive frequency volume or intensity of training that results in extreme fatigue illness or injury and often due to lack of sufficient rest recovery and perhaps nutrient intake that's a definition of overtraining and from what I've seen and known from athletes and spoken to in the past that can be six months 12 months it can actually sometimes even be career-ending because it is a really significant and serious issue where people don't sleep they don't want to eat they can't train they've got no energy a lot of things like the reels properly fall off yeah there's just a jump in then on just something specific to probably calisthenics and the people that are listening that the sort of the notion you made about CT flexure saying there is none and saying that actually it can be quite difficult to actually get into that fully overtrained area but with the fact that those who are still engaged in calisthenics and love it the things like the rate of progression and the enjoyment and the sort of addictive nature of learning to do some of these cool new things one can make it I believe it's more susceptible to that because we don't want to have a break and rest because we still want to go and do that thing that we're striving to do and then on top of that the things that when we're trying to redefine our own possible some of those things are super maximal like they are more than we can currently do unless you can still overtrain when you're doing bench press but chances are if you can't lift 100 kilos on the bench press you don't put 110 on and just keep having a crack at it whereas if you can't you know take two legs off in a frog stand for example there's there's times when you have to try and test that can I now take two off or not and we're training some of that intensity is above what we're at and that can make things susceptible to it a little bit that's where I just think there's a little bit of a flight there's a little bit of something in calisthenics that means that the whole reason why we're doing this podcast is to to put some markers in place to go okay what what do I need to look out for for if I'm potentially overtraining or getting towards that area um and then what are we gonna what we're gonna do to maximize our recovery so one it doesn't happen to we actually progress better and faster yeah I think the the the important point is where we're overtraining is this it's total physiological system why shut down it's not localized which is what we're often going to find in calisthenics where we're doing a lot of load and intensity through the same joints so overtraining isn't having a shoulder problem or elbow issue that's an injury or a niggle overtraining is is much more serious so we ultimately want to avoid that and this is where we're going to start to kind of we want to wind back but that's our end goal we don't want not end goal that's the end point we don't we want to avoid at all costs so bringing that back a little bit just to define some of the technology the step before overtraining is what we have is overreaching which is actually a positive place to be and often we'll schedule for athletes in our own training scheduled periods of overreaching where you're pushing the limits pretty hard because we want to then go and get adaptation now where I think a lot of people fall down on is the overreach for too long when we overreach with a periodized plan the focus is then to apply stress for ace determine a period of time followed by a scheduled rest period we know we're going to hit that rest period if that's pre-competition we might be loading for the for the month month or say six weeks out from a competition and then two weeks or ten days before we drop the intensity or the volume down at least intensity may stay still quite high but we're not asking the athletes to do as much and therefore the system gets chance to recover we get the super compensation we're looking for as a result of this the response to the stress that's the adaptation that we need so we get super compensation if we hit that right it's in time for the competition the guys go and they fly for russian calisthenics and recreational athletes would often find ourselves overreaching because we're training consistently week in week out we're chasing these goals we're super excited about it we're training hard give yourself a pat on the back and all of a sudden like you start to kind of feel like it's actually i'm not feeling that good i think that's one that i think that's one of the biggest difficulties of being an amateur recreational fitness enthusiast wherever you want to call yourself that you don't have that competition where you are going to definitely plan to peak and rest and therefore rest for it and also suddenly telling you this is your volume for this week yeah it's a scheduled rest week and you do what you told yeah i mean you can do the way you like every week yeah i'm trying not to bore people with like or rugby stories but like i've done i've got the contrast of both like doing a weekly thing where literally most weeks when i was playing pro rugby monday tuesday wednesday felt pretty crap but then thursday friday and if we played sunday saturday would be like super easy days and you'd feel great for the game and then you'd feel crap again at the start of the week whereas now i don't have anything to rest for effectively like i'm with people in there going like this is difficult when you don't have that thing to try and peak for um and so that's um first first step for me is just like being aware of that um so that so that you know that that's what's happening yeah and that and then you know then we can start once we have the awareness then we can start thinking about how to how to to put the strategies in place to keep on top of it yeah yeah absolutely i think as recreational athletes we we train the level of intensity we do because we enjoy it and it makes us feel good but there's also that psychological side of training addiction i think which is an interesting one of people training and feeling like if they don't train they're going to get themselves into they're going to lose all the gains they just they don't they they lose that sort of um the the hormonal or the the sort of like the um which hormone am i thinking of the dopamine hits and the serotonin of the benefits of of exercise and we don't get that we start to feel bad we look at ourselves differently in the mirror we get this kind of that negative downward spiral as a result of not training and and that means that we just continue to train where the important thing about that is that we actually understand that rest weeks or delo weeks are not steps backwards they're actually steps forwards and we have to go through that process of psychologically dealing with not training and then one of the things you can do that before we get into a little bit around recovery strategies and how we can manage fatigue is if we're going to try and prep an athlete or even even in our own training and we're going to use this delo week so we might have gone a three week load that's out of virtual classroom programs are set up it's three weeks of intensity followed by a scheduled one week delo where we drop the volume down but intensity stays high so on the week three or if we work it through maybe we've gone week one it could be 12 reps and two sets for argument sake week two will be 10 reps and three sets week three eight reps and four sets what we might do on week number four as a delo is just go 10 reps one set but that 10 reps needs to be at intensity and research has shown that we can maintain strength levels for about 20 weeks or so if we keep the intensity effectively it makes sense if you tell your brain or central nervous system that you need to perform with intensity at this level it's going to keep that motor ability it's not going to drop it back if we go and train under that level it's going to think well do you know what no point being this that strong we don't really need all of that strength so we maybe can just shed a little bit of this so by maintaining intensity we can get through a delo week without losing anything but we're creating space to recover because the volume isn't as high we're not asking the system to do as much work and as a result we get the recovery yeah 100% um do you want to just uh if people are asking a question okay i'm i'm smashing myself fairly regularly with my training i train four five six i've x met a number of times a week what are some of the markers then that we that they need to be looking out for in terms of am i am i potentially over training or you know am i taking my overreaching a bit too far yeah i think people will probably know when they get to the over training stage that's the positive thing to think about if you really like things are going to go wrong at that stage overreaching is probably more difficult to start to be aware of and is that self-awareness of taking a step back and actually knowing how do i feel like every time i go in the gym and you you've said in the past that i want to pat myself on the back but you've said to me i do this quite well timmy tim is very good at this i'm learning from fishing fishing for a compliment no no no no no no but i'll go in the whole time and i'll i'll go in about how do i feel today or how do i feel when i wake up and if i'm buzzing to train i'm going to go like and i'll push it because i know there's going to be times when i go in and i might do the first set of example of the day my training hasn't kicked off well this year but and it start well it's getting better i did one set of hands and push ups against the wall which would have normally been easy and it felt shocking and i was like i'm not doing anymore to bend it rather than sort of chasing that i think i've got to do those today because it's on the program i just went and did something else so understanding where you're at on any given days is super important and having the flexibility when you train program to go i don't have to train today i think that's that's having the flexibility on mine to give yourself the permission to do that that's where i've slowly slowly slowly trying to get to that place and i've have made some progress on that i do believe and do think but i'm a stick stifler and i'm sure the people are for literally going i said i'm going to do X number reps and sets of this thing and then even if it feels shocking you feel guilty if you're not going to do them because that's what you plan yeah and that's what's on the program and actually it the freedom comes from in your mind allowing yourself to have that i think that's that is a that's a mindset thing that is a yeah a trust in what you're doing on the on the macro in the big scale rather than just in the micro going not all of a sudden going i can't do a muscle up anymore i can't do a frog stand anymore what we have we've had people have those types of conversations and it's actually no it's just the reason why they felt shocking could be any number of things that they can work out but ultimately it doesn't matter that much what matters is what you then actually go and do and train and you can only that's just a one sort of thing you can only there's only there's no need to do there's as much trying to get my words right on this trying to what i'm trying to say is like there's no point in doing any more work than you can recover from yeah because you can't recover from it then it's only going to be detrimental even if you try and do it but again there's lots of lots of people out there and i've been there myself before where depending on what sort of training environment you've been in before like slugging it out and gritting your teeth and like i got asked to do that for many years in a row where it's then different when it gets trained into you like say if someone's been in the army which would be way and others sort of forces things will be way beyond trying to do rugby i can imagine like the mindset you get put in for that then is going to be going to stay with you for quite some time when you come out so things like that do you know what i mean like we did arm we did like preseason and army camps and whatnot and they're like we used a phrase when i first met you which was like more is more and i'd never heard that before and i was like i know exactly what you mean but i just used to say it was like we yeah we would joke about it like when we because at times you'd literally go like oh i mean we we weren't true about but you'd hear stories of other teams where they go like they're lost saturday sunday's rest day and then they go i know actually coming in now doing fitness yeah hard because you went very fit yeah that would help and it's like i just because because you know that i wasn't very fit because i was maxed out for the last 18 minutes so what was really good is you just maxed me out again without giving me recovery from what i've just done monday's gonna go down real well yeah but we've often talked in sports before around like you want to do the least amount of work to get the most amount of change and often it's that um can we um it's not the amount of work you can do it's the amount of work you can recover from and that's what's going to create sort of long-term change that's whatever that's what i was trying to say really strong to get there swimmers are a nightmare for that we've done a lot of work in swimming and um you often find a coach a swimming coach will write a set and they want to hit a certain amount of volume for example so they might have finished their set on the board and they've written down how many lengths of distances and strokes or whatever else they're going to do and the total might have come in at say four thousand or i said five thousand six hundred meters they weren't just go that's the amount of work we need to do they'll make we'll do four hundred easy or four hundred something else to make it six thousand because i've got to hit this total volume by the end of the week and i look kind of go why are you doing that it's just the phrase that they use in swimming is garbage yardage like you're just doing it for the sake of doing it not because it's actually creating an adaptation um so that we've been a little bit off tact there but the point of that being that we want to make sure that we are efficient with the training and what we're doing and training when we feel like we want to train so go back to your point jackie's i know you've got a yeah i want to hit you with a few then so like some things that like so if you are uh classic ones if you're over training if you're starting to your appetite you start to lose your appetite you find that your sleep is disrupted as you're waking up in the middle of the night you find it difficult to go to sleep and you normally sleep well that can be a bit of a marker um you know what the biggest one for me is don't want to train yeah but you force yourself into it you remember what joe my old SNC coach we had him on the podcast you can people can check their comment what number it was it wasn't that there's any probably a couple months ago yeah where he said he gave that exact advice if you don't want to go and train and you are a serial over trainer don't make yourself um it's different advice if you are you are only just getting starting getting into fitness you don't you're scared of going to the gym trailer or as or you've got these things you're only really often train once a week sometimes you don't at all like that's a different that's a different conversation um and then a really really big one is if you are training hard doing a lot of work you're on point you're following your probably you might be following a program in virtual class so you might not you might yeah that'd be fine because they've got a delayed week scheduled for them yeah but they might find it hard to do that delayed week and if you find that you are no longer making progress i go in the gym and i feel weaker and everything feels harder you're not recovering as well then it's then it almost must be that you are not giving yourself that chance to recover and that you're going down the route of overtraining so i think there might from there would be the most obvious ones to look out for it so definitely i think that that is sort of appetite to train is a big one um stress and the other one for me the big one is niggles if you're starting to feel like your body's breaking down and you just your shoulders a little bit niggly or you just not that's a sign that you're not recovering elbows start flaring up particularly in calisthenics those niggles are early signs of a system not recovering all there's some form of postural imbalance that's going on so again it's looking about what work have i done previously is it just work has actually been quite balanced the training program has been good but i'm starting to feel like i can't keep up with this maximal strength training is a massive one for this for me if you're doing heavy reps and you're doing high intensity work and you are starting to feel like you're nearly just not firing when you get in the gym and the joints are starting to feel sore you 100% need to take some deload and recovery or the deload or what we're going to go into next is how do you promote faster recovery between sessions because if you if you continue to just drill that that pattern that you're doing take pull-ups as an example and you're not recovering body's breaking down that niggle will become an injury at some point and it will sideline you and your body will get your recovery it's just going to force it upon you like your body's not stupid it knows it can't continue to do that for a while so the brain will just stop from training that's effectively what over-training is a central nervous system going i'm doing this anymore guys like pack up we're having a hard day and you'll have to pick up the pieces so then final thing i wanted to mention before because this is we've all taught purely based on training and the physical training you do is just going to be one of the stresses you're putting on your body i'm making this because captain said my wife said this to me this very good she gave this to me this morning take it as your own you know it was like now give her a shout i'm going to listen um yeah she's right um i know she should do because we prove that i'm listening to it right yeah she says i'm not listening um that yeah so your physical training that we do in the gym or however you do it that's just one of the stresses you've got a ton of other stresses on the body that the body's going to do it so we have to look at the full picture um of what's going on in your life and take all that into consideration not just if i'm training i don't feel like i'm over-training with my training but when i go in the gym i feel crap and you know i've just had a baby and i'm only getting four hours broken sleep or what or else is going on in your life maybe London or anything like that mental stress emotional stress there's so many different things um that go into this and then actually when you think of it like that you go oh cranky the training stress is like i feel like that's quite a big one i've bought myself but it is only just one factor and then it's something that i'm trying to do having you know we've had some great guests on recently that are very much more holistic like tony riddle sally bell um witchy norton where what other things in my life can i look at and improve the recovery of those things um and and trying to just throw that into into the mix and just wanted to flag that up there because everything else we're probably going to talk about here on in is going to be very much training based on recovering from training that's an interesting point because a lot of what we are going to talk about will come from the sport science literature of what do we do in an elite performance environment to speed recovery and it's probably going to it will come at some point but breathwork isn't going to feature on that list of what a lot of people are doing um apart from the guy we saw jamie shepherd speak at the uk sca and he trained at the time i think he's still there was working with this canadian snowboarding team um and they were training the gym and then he said we just go and lay out in the grass we breathe and we meditate and we dig it that's like that sounds amazing but these sorts of things of actually the wellness around your just general health and well-being is way more important than whether you go home and put your compression tights on um putting into contact so breath work again i might have finished my breath work coming to reason the oxygen advantage and it is amazing but i'm only about a quarter way through um so i will have some more views on that um yeah jacko won't be able to talk in a podcast for long because he'll be out of his mouth before we started yeah mrs jacko asks is it i'll take him and they ask a few funny questions or you certainly raise some eyebrows when you rock up into the bedroom with a roller gaffer tape but different that's for another podcast right anyway so um if that's really where it freaked you out don't freak out if you just read oxenavantage book so when we let's talk about his potential recovery strategies then that the ones that sort of the sport science will work well research and the things that we've used with athletes in the past and it's worth just thinking about there's a hierarchy of these this can i just say there are many people often and so i've just put it in but like we often get asked and we give out most of our advice information which is like how do i make my training better like very rarely and well we do have a lot of questions but this is more about okay what about making your training better if you make your training better you also have to make your recovery better because you're potentially going to be like doing more work or better quality or whatever and we don't probably go how can i maximize my recovery it's very natural to think how do i maximize my training um so i got really excited about that no it's fine so we love him so we would typically kind of categorize these and we'll sort of say it like there are so level one things and level one being the first level call it gold standard or your basic essentials that are going to give us yeah the best sort of return on your investment and there are some quite sort of sexy sort of gimmicky stuff a little bit down the line gimmicky is a productive yeah yeah we'll come to that again later um that might look more attractive and like look easy but actually it's the simple things done well which are going to have the biggest impact remember the human body and the system is fairly primitive in many of its uh in much of its design in the sense of it really likes sleep so if the body is tired and it's stressed from from wherever that the source of that stress comes from one of the number one things that you can do to make sure that you are given the best chance of recovery is get a decent night's sleep um we will actually in the level two we're actually going to put napping into that as well but if you've nailed down a decent amount of sleep um and it's decent it's good quality it's restful that's when so much of the regenerative processes take place while we are sleeping that's your first like sort of number one sort of gold standard thing you can you can have a look at the other ones we're going to start to think about are going to be nutrition so what we're fueling if we're doing sessions and they are intense and the body is going to need the right nutrients to be able to to actually replenish the stores and to to repair and to grow whatever that might be and that's not a referral towards a supplementation that is just all well well-rounded basic day-to-day nutrition we're not talking about how much protein you're taking in necessarily what supplement or which powders you're going to use is it creatinine is it beet raniline whatever we're talking about just eat well just basics and get plenty of fruit and veggie and decent amount of protein sources wherever that comes from carbohydrates from a good source to to make sure you're refilling glycogen stores etc real simple as a nutrition yeah and just remember one of those markers of overtrading might be loss of appetite and then therefore you're in then a bit of a cycle of you might not be eating then enough calories enough food to actually help when so that that's they come those two things are going to work against you so making sure that you're aware of those and you've planned and got that in place to make sure that you are staying on top of them just going back to the sleep that's what I was just searching for because I like it when we if I like listening to other people's podcasts you know and they can like tell you the actual yeah what so I was trying to interactive um episode 92 with nick little hails sleep expert if you want to know a little bit more about sleep and how to maximize it etc etc including uh naps and everything fantastic podcast and advice in that one so that's episode 92 check that one out haven't yet um the next one I was just going to touch on with that is around we talk like rest and sleep is going to come sort of together but rest from trading as we've touched on already you've probably got the point across that we think that scheduled breaks or gaps deload weeks lower intensity or lower volume weeks within training programs are of value so making sure that we are taking time to allow the boy to recover by giving it a scheduled deload and one of the other ones that fits in and this is comes on two fronts is around mobility work mobility work is really good for restoring the system and there's two things and jack and I have changed ourselves on this in the past before we don't do a great job of it all the time often because how we're all kind of training we'll finish a session done loads of super high intensity store put a ton of intensity through the through the connective tissue and through the joints and then the session is finished and walk out the door how much value would there be to my recovery if I actually spent five to ten minutes just down regulating the system I've just ramped it up and put a ton of stimulation through it actually just spending some time coming back down so typically and back in the olden days we would have called that a cooldown anymore like it's one of the things where we just kind of just ditch it off in in gym environments so a little bit of work and maybe some active recovery just flush the system just gently or it might be that we are going to go and do some stretching some mobility works and release work mobilization of our breath work then as well but we're helping down regulate the central nervous system too and that sounds really fluffy it's a source of I've got to be somewhere I've got to go five to ten minutes just to promote recovery and if you can't do it straight after the session we can probably find times throughout the rest of the next day or later on that day whatever it might be a walk a gentle jog we used to do recovery session when I was working university on a Thursday the guys will play Wednesday afternoon for the rugby team they would come on a Thursday we'd roll out stretch out mobilize and then we'd go and trickle on a bike or something just to do low ticking over 60 max heart rate and just do 20 minutes just to flush the legs we would do that we would do that after every game yeah flush the legs 20 minutes half an hour they say 60 like nice and easy and just um yeah flush the system out I find that helps for me just going for a gentle jog sometimes yeah it will swim always have to kill yourself yeah um and on just on that um in terms of going like would five or ten minutes be well spent just stretching or down regulating basically doing a cooldown and if you're asking yourself the question I don't know if I can fit that in when you're at the end of your session doing the final exercise or the last set or two sets ask us and you and if you're asking yourself the question you know am I over training a bit too much I feel pretty smart but then go I haven't got time to do that that well maybe swapping your final couple of sets or final exercise for that might not be a bad thing and at least test it out do it for a few weeks do you start to feel a little bit better like we're trying to give help and advice for those that are seeking that extra little bit of like and that's maybe one thing of it's what we're going to prioritize if you if you don't prioritize your recovery you're never going to be greater recovery yeah so on those sort of level one options it's pretty basic as said sleep nutrition get in rest or or scheduled recovery and investing in mobilization a lot of the stuff that we do in calisthenics can be quite high tension particularly in all sports the same but just going back to mobility and spending some time deregulating the system in whatever format that might look like for you but actually bringing the system back down to a resting state rather than ramping it up and just go and see what I'm doing we're gonna have to go and get some more stress now I can go back to work or whatever yeah yeah I think what you the point you've made before about planning scheduled like deloed weeks all of those things you just said there all require or all gonna require you to or actually plan those things out so actually just be a little bit more conscious a little bit more aware and plan out some of those things that are as you say level one basic simple there's not really an excuse as everyone can do those you just have to want to do them and yeah a little bit of a planning place to make sure they happen and with those things going to tick that off if you get a decent night's sleep like sort of average in eight hours of eight hours a night consistently not in one night but consistently over a period of weeks and we've got scheduled delos and we're investing some time in some mobility we're eating well right okay but I've got I've got athletes are doing those things well happy days like we can start to look at level two kind of progressions are you ready for a share gone last three nights woke up at 3 30 a.m. 4 a.m. and 4 30 a.m. couldn't really get back to sleep till I don't know when like we've got a tiny bit of sleep before alarm goes off at 6 and I'm like immediately going now quit going so I have been going right why is that happening where am I I mean I'm still in where the moment trainings feels pretty decent but there's something amiss here and what is it to do with the over is it the stressor of the physical training or are there some other things that I'm stressing out about but immediately when that starts to happen it's like right what what am I going to do to try and fix this that's not right I've had the same thing I'll see we were I was away for quite a lot of December and I started wasn't sleeping while I was sleeping terribly before we went because we're trying to get everything done before we went I wasn't I really bad night sleep started to sleep really well as a holiday first night or first day night after we got back in to start thinking about work I wake up in the middle of the night go to the toilet come back and my mind is like on let's think about all this stuff too and it's happening now see and so I've got to do something as well to try and just get myself to a point where I'm sleeping better but I'm quite a light sleeper so it doesn't take a lot to wake me up and when I'm awake I'm like range wants to go but that's the first one can we protect that time well screens before bed that'll come up in nicks or hails but that's an obvious one for people but one that this day and age we're all guilty on yeah so get your screens off right level two things we get to the more sort of the sexiest sort of of the bits where the sports marketing comes in and tells us all these things that we need so compression is one of the things we're getting compression types on are they good for recovery if you're interested you can go and read some of the research around that the original compression type concept came from bed ridden patients who couldn't move about if you are moving about then your calf pump if you are an ambulant person is going to be doing a large amount of the work of starting to get the blood that is pooling in the legs which is full of waste products and lactic acid that kind of thing back moving around the system so that's where the active recovery comes in and just moving blood around the system more to improve that sort of that clear out and just to get stop that pooling if the compression has got some merit if the compression garment creates enough compression you need actually quite high values the original medical grade ones were like I could feel your legs but the ones we get now often are not necessarily tight enough so you need a good pair of compression types and typically like if we're going to get the guys if we're going to travel with the athletes and teams if we're doing long haul flights we have compression garments on we might have compression socks if they've done heavy sessions we might be used we might sleeping in them but it's those periods of time where we have got eight ten twelve hours of compression where we're not really been moving around that much that's when we want to start and to worry about it I wear compression tights quite a lot because I like how they feel there's a perceptual thing which we're going to come on to later on but that's the science behind a compression it's not guaranteed and not magic there are certain circumstances where they have a little bit more impact I've got a tight upper body one I like to ensure that it's so tight that it is a struggle to get off that's a marker of me ever good don't do that the other one is going to be soft tissue but that's pretty good we've used that before in a passive actually getting some release work done hands-on therapy that's not available to everybody all the time so go back to point one around just investing your own mobility and that kind of thing sleep I'll go back to naps taking power naps throughout the day 25 minutes 45 minutes maximum hitting those cycles especially if you're not sleeping well at night if we've got athletes like in swimming they wake up early they're in the gym you could be doing the same thing six o'clock sessions you're getting to bed at 10 you're struggling to get that eight hours in you can go and top some of that up a little bit by putting a sleep cycle in later on in the day if you can again it depends on what your work is like and again going back to Jaco's point Nick offers some good suggestions around how we can build those kind of like nap periods into the heat ideally everyone have a bed at work as well when they don't know I don't know everybody you will be able to do that so those are some of the like the level two areas where we start to think about and specific nutrition as well and that might come down to what sort of training we're doing if we're doing a hypertrophy block of building muscle mass we're going to prompt and improve recovery by taking a nutritional approach which is more specific than that type of training or if it's an endurance type adaptation in calisthenics I don't think we desperately need to do a huge amount of that unless you are training for something else if you're getting a basic sort of solid diet in around your day-to-day nutrition and you are getting your protein requirements in your carbohydrate basics do we need to start worrying about specific strategies maybe if you're trying to put some muscle mass on but if you're also training for a marathon at the same time and that becomes a bit more individualized perhaps yeah and I think a lot of people listening are often like us they do other things they like running or cycling OCRs or whatever it may be um but ultimately like what's all about we might have certain goals that we've got as well but ultimately what's training in our life about we've talked a lot in the past about and probably think about it more and more and more every single day week month year we get older of like it we need to have an eye on there should be some element of like I want to be able to use my body when I'm older and I want to be fit healthy and well and enjoy life for the rest of of my life so like what would be the impact of me at 45 years old going hell for leather at some marathon goal I don't know I'm just posing that sort of question if you know what I mean so if we if we work if we work a bit more generalists we'll probably get less obsessive about things as well if you've got that type of personality and then I'm going to come back to ice bath in a minute or which might have fallen into category two but we'll just I want to because it links into the perceptual animators I don't know if it was in the magic box yeah this is the thing we should be doing and the level three that we'll often use with athletes is targeted supplementation it could be for example that we are a recovery based supplements but a lot of the supplements that we'll use are going to be performance based there are times where athletes have had collagen supplementation before they've got as a total policy but there's a number of different specific things but for most people and they're following they're being prescribed by the nutritional therapist exactly sports yeah that's in person at a professional outfit yeah so there's different things that you can do within that the other ones that we use are something called a normal tech which is a high end sort of compression based device if you want to court that it's big leg sleeves you put your leg in it just ramps up compression it goes more like to what the original um medical grade compression garments were like but it flushes have you ever tried i've never tried them yeah they're good yeah they feel nice you see there are lots how much is lots i don't know thousands but i'm not gonna have one at home yeah i don't know i don't actually know you know it's like it's just you don't buy anything yeah so it just appears when you're gaging goes you want to play this i'm like yes we can track it on i'll have a go what is it i don't know have a go is it to do training yeah it might be bigger um so you can be there's an upper and lower body version ones you plug yourself in it wears away you sit there and it flushes without having legs affected but they're pretty effective there's also been called game ready which includes a bit of like cold water therapy within that and then we also have something called fireflies or geckos which are sort of a little like magnet electric magnetic stimulant for the calf which again just keeps that calf pump working to stop broken pooling and sometimes the guards use those on flights is essentially what it is but it gets all sexy the sports with formancy but if you're not doing level one if you're only getting five hours of sleep all right you're putting a firefly on isn't absolutely like just pissing me away wins and you know the vast majority of us haven't got access to that and we can't afford it anyway but like i say actually how many people i would actually question how many of the people using them are actually taking care of those basics like properly taking care of those bases because it takes real discipline yeah and that's where the hardest wins are the biggest wins are the bases though right yeah yeah and so just i'm going to switch on ice baths because it might be one of people are talking about the research in recent years has come out about this is actually starting to sort of tell a different story there's a time when it was a gold standard get an ice bath that'll sort your right out but what they're starting to do now is delve a little bit deeper and they're sort of saying well in this situation ice bath could actually detrimental to performance in this situation it could be quite useful so in competition environments we've got a fast turnaround potentially it's got some benefits we start talking about things like it depending on how the ice bath is done if it's a deep plunge pool we might get a level of compression there's an analgesic effect of taking pain away so the athlete doesn't feel quite sore they might decrease some inflammation get muscle temperature down these kind of things however if you're trying to build muscle what happens from a hormone perspective of um or the physiological response from an ice bath might not actually be beneficial for hypertrophy so the the jury's out as it is on a lot of this sort of stuff and that's why we go back to level one basics of the jury is not out on sleep it's not out on nutrition so those are the things that we know are going to have an impact the rest of this sort of stuff depending on which paper you read you're going to find some very conflicting results with the with the ice bath all the cold stuff you've also mixed in with that it's something that we have done in when we when I was playing with we did in the past was some some hot cold therapy so transitioning from one to the two three minutes of each to help with that sort of flushing system and to get rid of some some of the toxins etc and that's like cold water therapies become very popular in recent years but we're not talking about that's a different context is it going to is it going to improve general well-being there's a different conversation as to immediately post performance yeah different they overlap to a certain degree you know what I'm saying yeah going for a dip in the water in a cold lake daily is a different utilisation of us stressing ourselves in the gym and then going getting a nice bath for the purposes of and here's something I've just thought of actually going like say I've done I've done my session my recovery strategy is I'm jumping in the ice bath I've got an ice bath set up wherever I've been at home or however you do it I I jump in that I tick the box for myself it goes did my recovery and then that actually makes me think I'm doing a good job on it and then I slack off on my sleep other stressors emotional things going on in my life and slack off on my nutrition and then actually do you say I won't try and say that actually because you're ticking a box of this other thing but saying with saying that the I at the weekends in Whitby and you know whenever I'm at the sea I go in the sea I've left a pair of pants in Whitby was that was that related to the swim or not different story I've done that with Jack before recently oh it's not worth the effort and it was freezing it wasn't it wasn't frozen but it was pretty cold but and I when I come I love the feeling when I come out and I feel better for it and I thought I'd just use that as a segue into something that you'd mentioned before we've done a presentation to athletes on this subject before where the overriding factor I remember you saying at the end of of the presentations these athletes was what when if something works for you even if it's a placebo a placebo is a comment my dad normally put four percent four percent my dad loves a placebo have I told you about the placebo David you give someone creatin and it's as a placebo or give them what they think is creatin the research will suggest you have four to five percent improvement when it's just flipping bicarbonate or whatever yeah it's just yeah white powder yeah basically if if ice but if if me jumping in some cold water makes me feel better and I'm feeling like I'm recovering even if it is placebo I will take that yeah and then that and that just goes just opens up that thing I'm going like try stuff out see what you like see what works for you have a way of actually measuring whether you actually do feel better or not um and uh yeah just wanted to sort of segue into the intellect so you brought up nice I think they're all like that touch something with the compression as well like I like wearing compression garments I've got to sit on now because I've just I'm going to train in a bit um not massively because it's of any other reason that I feel like I'm massively near the recovery but they're just comfortable to wear and if doing something like that makes you feel good um then then it's it's of benefit there is value in that and and that was the study that jacko is referring to is around uh what they did on with the australian rules um i was rules football players and they tried a number of different combinations of ice baths and active mobility and static stretching and all these different compression and what they couldn't find was any real correlation between them I think it was um I think ice baths and static stretching actually came up pretty well but they're not because they physiologically could improve show why and I haven't shown why but what they were finding was athletes were feeling more prepared and better recovered for getting the following week but they came down through the highlight of the study was that it's probably around a great deal of perception if it feels good to get cold you feel like you've done something then it's probably going to have an impact and as you say that's super size or if you take your basics as like if you sleep everything's on on point and then we go and hit something else like uh that makes us feel good then we're probably going to promote that recovery or that feeling of recovery um and but I just will put that the caveat to that is I think that mental approach to a team sport is quite different to what we have to do in the gym when we go in the gym and it's dark winter's night in the UK how I feel about my training going into that and then what I'm actually able to do physically is different environments are going out into sports pitch where you've got the adrenaline of the game yeah yeah um no I yeah I know I would agree um with that there was just one um you made me think of one thing there were you talking about about that the that study that ultimately compared to those in the study that were doing nothing doing something oh yeah was like the the one thing that they could say was definitely helping improve it that that was the sort of the big takeaway of that that I you know I took away that it was like well if you don't do anything doing something is better than nothing whether you whether that you've got the uh the science to explain why maybe it's a placebo it doesn't matter what actually the main important thing is that you recover better for the next session you're going to do and and stop you from over training yeah so I think it's a nice for for people listening it's a nice simple I think sometimes takeaway messages are always not super simple like depending on what the subject matter is but that you can't get that much simpler than that game if you do something it's going to be better than doing nothing I've got sort of four than a t-shirt key points yeah something's better than nothing and more is more um I've got yes the four sort of key points to wrap this up so go right back to the beginning about thinking about um that context of over training is not something that we want to get to at all but you understand where the what we're trying to avoid is essentially where we've then gone with it so the roadmap back from that is yes you're going to train you're going to train hard how are you going to continue to allow yourself to train hard and progress by making better decisions and choices around recovery strategies so the number one thing that I've got to start off with listening to your body and to make sure that you are present and you're aware of how you're feeling and having the discipline and confidence to be able to act based on that because if you just ignore it you if you wake up you don't really want to go to the gym you're feeling niggly but this addictive cycle of training is just eating away at you and I've been there myself before um it doesn't lead to a great place is what I'm going to say so just listen to what your body is telling you and most of us have got additional stresses as Jaco said before I wanted to show I've also written that listen to your body down as well and the big difference is you listen to your body well I need to practice listening to my body there's one thing uh writing it down or saying this is what I'm going to do it's actually if you're not used to actually listening to your body body's trying to tell you loads of stuff but if you're not actually spending any time listening to that it's going to be harder for you it's not going to happen all of a sudden so if you take that on board after listening to the podcast think about it like anything we need to practice that and you're going to the more you do it you're going to get better at listening to your body and then you're going to really start don't sack it off if the first session you like it's not like a telephone call to your body don't don't sack it off if it like didn't change the world for you all these things are not that we're not looking for magic pills we're looking for lots of little small things that over a longer period of time build up and have a have a major effect in the long term but not on the in my friend short term that happens if people lose the mojo a little bit as well doesn't like probably just not feel like I want to do it so that's the first one the second one is just schedule recovery so make sure that if you are trading hard that you have then got periods of time where you're going to give yourself a deload sometimes you can be flexible on that one but it ties in with point one of going if you're really sort of like consistently training every single week like an athlete you're hitting set number of pro of sessions it's five sessions a week at great intensity nothing ever gets in the way of your training you 100% need to have scheduled to recovery times in if like me your training can be a bit up and down whereas one or two weeks I'm going hard then all of a sudden I've got a lot of work to do or we're traveling or whatever it might be then I'm probably going to roll that deload or that schedule recovery a little bit more flexibly but that the success of that relies on me being able to listen to my body so I'll take a deload when I feel like I need a deload but that's years of learning that process and being disciplined so it could be to start off with that you have a scheduled deload four weeks after or five six weeks into a block if you get to that and you're sort of like feeling do you know what actually feel great then fine do a little bit more that week if you get to that point and you're like you know what it would actually be quite nice for a down week to have a bit of a time off then take but make sure that it is on your agenda and it's not a negative it's actually extreme positive to have those periods of rest off the back of high intensity blocks of training should I go for number three yeah um now the basics that is what I'm going to say about that Jaco we've probably hammered that home up to this point but do the do this the the take the the low hanging fruit and the easy wins are your basics do those well first and then you can start to scale it from there and then my last one is experiment with some of the stuff if you I've experimented before a number of different things some of us still talk about recovery to play around with some different stuff see if it works I don't come home and jump in a cold bath full of ice partly because I just don't think it's going to have a massive benefit for what I'm doing I also think that there's um like the compression side of things and just sitting horizontally in the bath is not great time logistics of point ice in the bath all that sort of stuff um not to say there isn't benefits of cold water therapy which is not something that works for me whereas yeah well so yeah well I wanted to to ask you what you do do but just before you answer that just on that like I've got a relatively funny story on I I do like and during some of my best training periods is when I've been really disciplined with um having having cold baths um and I my body likes it I like I feel afterwards and it seems like it helps my recovery I'm happy if it's just a placebo um and though so um and I've go through periods I haven't done it for for ages but um I think it was last week or the week before I did it before bed and I was so cold I couldn't get warm I was sliding temperatures down I was sliding bed so I then I had a terrible night's sleep because I just couldn't get warm let your blanket was on not touching the sides you know strategy on on sleep on that is actually a warm shower shower followed by a fairly cool bedroom so they reckon warm shower before bed 18 degrees in the bedroom that happens to get sleep so you're the wrong way around yeah but yes off that I'm actually I like a cold shower but anyway different conversation maybe for me to get someone to talk about cold water at some point yeah so what you personally what do you what do you you've you mentioned your pressure compression that's almost because I like wearing them yeah um I like to train in them because it just feels comfortable so I don't use anything other than my level one you basically the thing is with him like he's very good at his basics and that's who you that would just take that on board if those the compression was level two but I'm using it not for the purposes necessarily of recovery um sometimes if I've got a compression garment I'm like if I've done a if I'm feeling it up a body I've got a tight upper body book on which I sometimes sleep in if I'm hammered but generally yeah is just like can I my dealer is the thing that saved me like it's my scheduled period of time where I'm just backing off and I've come back from any nutrition yeah I think give that it's juicy good on that and South Africa was like four weeks off training pretty much come back and everything feels great I don't feel that strong I need to do more but that he was we had questions all the time about golfers elbow or wrist pain I'm like what do I need to do I'm at rest yeah and the looks people give me I'm like the only way to get rid of a tendinopathy from that perspective yeah there's some corrective stuff you can do but it needs to be deloaded because if you've frayed that tendon so much that it now can't recover it it's going to need takes time so you need to unload it people don't want to hear that but that's the point do that well first we don't get that point my elbows start niggling I back up off and give them some rest and some recovery it's being sensible with that yeah yeah and my last one I'm going to get Jack a wrap it up because I just got a quote that I thought was really interesting from a track and field athlete an American called Lauren fleshman says anyone can train hard but do you have the discipline to recover and I think that's the the real key point it's the same as we're using conditioning before and past anyone can make you tired anyone can make you sick but can you actually put together a properly structured training program which is going to give you an adaptation it's exactly the same recovery as a strategy what strategy are you going to use to get outcome that you want and it takes discipline and it could be it could be the thing that stops you getting injured it could be the major difference in you progressing and achieving the goals that you want to do it is it is it could it's not a magic bullet in the in like the short term but it is over the longer period potentially going to make the difference for you and I think in today's world there's number one level basics are more important than they've ever been before because we're dealing with so much stress and stimulation all day every day that just those are goes back to Sally well like it's that if you go back to it we're talking recovery same principles about health and wellbeing carries through it's there don't think there's any coincidence that the body responds well to these things if they're done well and what we can then put on is a little bit of icing if you want to go and play around with me yeah Sally Bell that's Dr Sally Bell we did a two part series with her functional medicine practitioner and doctor so if you haven't seen those and you are interested in in that they are I've listened to them back myself as well because they are there's some gold in there they're really good ones so I didn't check them out I can't remember the numbers I did mention actually the very brief is something to finish on as your you've experienced yes I was gonna say I was going to I was going to answer the question what do you do Jackie sorry rewind it's a jacket as well your recovery strategy is basically the same as yours tried to take care of those level ones he said I've got a tight compression top that again like you said sleep in sometimes but just not every night by far and then yes I said talk about cold then the other bathing therapy that I like is epsom salts so there's she's basically magnesium magnesium sulfate and what you try and do is get a magnesium is dissolved into the water and it's going to come in through the skin and come into the body that way and there's there's plenty of research out they can have a little bit of a look yourself there's one from the University of Birmingham doctor wiring that's looked at this a few times and because there's some questions about like how much actually goes through into how she comes into the skin etc but there's there's there's evidence out there and maybe and even for me maybe it's a placebo maybe it isn't but the same principle as with the cold but there is some research out there to say that in in an athletic population if you're training hard that magnesium and levels do decrease because of how they get used for for your energy production for your training and and the epsom salts can be a good way to do that and sort of general markers are about 400 to 600 grams in an average size bath depending on how much of a how big your bath is then you have to work off of that but that's basically like a decent cups work cup full of epsom salts it's quite if you've never tried it it's it's quite an easy one hot bath nice and relaxing etc as well and it's pretty cheap a siphon effective actually whether the epsom salt do anything or not what I think is probably quite good for you to sit in a bath put some candles on read your book you know and then get your gaffer tape ready for bed I wasn't going to be a lot of questions about the gaffer tape just but you've got a good tip though epsom salt is much cheaper off somewhere like ebay than getting them from boots yeah I go like sorry you can you can well you can go boots and just get like a small you can get like your 400 grams for like test out one thing and it'll cost you like a couple of quid or something fine get half a ton of your local yeah you can go I get mine off ebay or amazon or whatever and you're like if you buy a 25 or 20 kilo bag you get it like a pound of kilos it's like it's pence per per bath and there yeah that's if you're well into it then you can go bulk yeah other than that I think that's pretty much a wrap yeah enjoyed it cool with some ground I hope I hope you out there listening listening or hopefully this will go out on that you might be watching on YouTube as well thank you to those that logged in the VIP members of the virtual classroom to listen to it live you're hearing it literally as we're talking for everyone else it's well you'll listen to it now but it's two weeks after it was you there's one that seems like when you're listening to it you you know what I mean it's like life everyone but it's not I don't mean but when they're as I'm saying this now they're listening they're here if you're listening on iTunes it is the day that you're listening to it on but we recorded on a different day join me like we're the future yeah well no we're the past yeah you know what I mean yeah complex problems there's a good job you never stood in quantum mechanics or something like that wasn't it you're doing a right mess anyway that's it that is it if you've got any questions guys you can engage with on social send them over on on Instagram or well which are a platform you prefer if you enjoyed the podcast and you think it would be useful for the people then please share it around we really value any support that you want to give in just spreading a word about some of this information that we're trying to disseminate yeah to share it around with friends we'd really appreciate that check out some of those other podcasts that we mentioned well the sleep the one's a doctor and give us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to the podcast we really appreciate that we really like as well when you take a screenshot and you post it yes screenshot well I'd be interested in hearing what recovery strategies other people do some might be some things that we've not mentioned you know screenshot the podcast put on let us a little note of like what things do you do and then we'll share those so we can start to within that whole community online we can start to share everybody so everyone is going to be able to hear Tim's laughing at me now for some reason everyone's going to be able to you know share what recovery things they have and that might throw a few other extra things into the next book I was just going to say if anyone's got any good gaffer tape tips that send us in DM I wouldn't put them public I'll send you a photo oh yeah yeah anyway let's get off that ramp let's go go go go go so thanks for listening guys we massively appreciate it I hope you guys have a good week get on get stuck into your training and until next time class dismissed