 Yo, so let's talk a little bit today about the importance of recovery and I'm not just talking about it as in, you know, you do some training, you're tired, you gotta recover to get back on your feet and be able to continue the next day. That's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about recovery today. I want to talk about what happens in the body as we get fitter, how we actually get fitter because that's the goal of training, isn't it? We're not just training to stay the same, we're training to get better and in order to improve recovery is key and there's a very specific way of looking at it that I think you should understand and that's what I want to explain to you today so stay tuned. When you go to a restaurant and you order food, you go there, you order your food from the menu, you give it to the waiter and then you wait, right, for the food to arrive. Well, you wouldn't just after making the order be like, oh, I think we're done here, aren't we, honey? Yes, let's go home and then you would leave the restaurant, that would be pretty weird to order food and not eat it because this is actually exactly what happens when you are doing a training session and then spending the next few hours or days stressing around and doing too much stuff and not emphasizing a recovery. Here's why. When you go out and do a training session, okay, it could be an easier run, it could be a quality interval session, it could be strength training in the gym, it could be any sport, anything, you're stressing the various systems of the body, okay. You're going from a resting state, which is what I'm in right now, sitting here in my office and then suddenly I go out running, you're going from a resting state to a very active, very stressful state, depends on the intensity of your exercise and the duration, etc. But you're stressing it. Now, that is equivalent with the order at the restaurant, okay. When you come home from a run, you're not fitter than when you went out, you're less fit actually. When you're training, you break the body down, okay, you are stressing it and breaking it down. You come home less fit than you were before, right. You know this because if you go out for a two-hour long run and then you come home, if someone told you, hey, go out for a two-hour long run immediately, again, you wouldn't be able to complete that second long run as well as you did the first one. So you're less fit than when you started. My computer just started making sounds, so we're going to close it, even though it looked cool when it was open. Quiet. So if we're less fit than when we started, how do we get fitter? How do we build our fitness then? Well, that happens of course in the second phase of training, the recovery phase, right. First you break the body down, then you recover. That's the process. Now, the way it happens inside the body is like this. You ask the body to adapt by stressing it. Basically, you're going out and telling it, hey, this is what I want you to be able to do, right. You're pushing some limits. You're running a little further or a little faster than you're used to. Just a little bit, not too much. If you go too much longer or too faster than what you're used to, you'll just get injured. You'll overburden your structural system or even your body as a whole. You don't want to do that. You just want to push the limits slightly from underneath the ceiling, right. You're telling the body, hey, I want you to be able to run a little longer. So I'm stressing you today to do that. That's the order, right. That's the order at the restaurant. Now, the kitchen has to make your order, cook the food and deliver it to you. Well, that's kind of what happens in the recovery. Your body now has to cook up the adaptations. You probably heard that word, right. Adaptations. Well, that's what happens inside the body. All the little things where the body builds new structures, builds new capillaries in your muscle, little blood vessels, creates more mitochondria, okay. Your muscle gets stronger. Your heart gets stronger, bigger. Blood volume increases. You produce more red blood cells. Like there is all these little things that happen around your, in your body, especially in the muscles, of course, that move you as a runner. And these little things make you a better runner, make you fitter. But they can only happen in a peaceful, restful environment. You know, if you can just get away with your training, but without sort of breaking down, that doesn't mean that you're benefiting as much from that training as someone else would if they were actually just resting. So if you look at an elite athlete, for example, they'll do their workout in the morning and then they'll work out in the evening or afternoon. And then in the day, they'll be napping and they'll be lying around. And they'll be just chilling, you know, they don't do much in between. That's not because they're lazy. That's because they're actually working. They're letting their body work at building adaptations. You can have two people doing the same workout. One person is resting. The other person is stressing around. And the person resting will actually get more out of the workout. Okay, so I guess the analogy with the restaurant breaks down a little bit here, but you could almost see it as you order food and one person gets a huge meal. You know, the kitchen was able to produce more food somehow than the other person where the kitchen was only able to produce a little bit, maybe just enough to keep you where you were in the first place. So actually you will just stay the same. Let's see if we can do this. So this is where you're at today, right? Then you do a session, a training session. You break down the body, your fitness goes down. Then over the next couple of days, you recover and you get back to where you were. If that's all you want to do, and you just want to continue like that, always staying the same. That's fine. But why would you do that? Wouldn't you rather have it happen like this? Where you start out here, you break the body down, you recover over the next few days back to where you were, but actually you recover a little further. You come a little bit higher up than where you started. Then you break the body down again. And again, you come back a little bit higher. And over time, your trend horrible drawing on my part, the trend is up. On the long term, you're trending upwards in fitness because you're always arriving a little bit more fit than you were last week because you're allowing enough recovery. People often praise elite athletes saying, oh, look at this session. Look at how many kilometers they're running in a week. Look at this crazy monster session. They're so amazing these athletes. They can do these crazy sessions. Well, that's just half the story. We should also say, hey, look at this athlete. Look at how he's crushing his recovery by just sleeping 12 hours. Wow. He sleeps 12 hours. That's awesome. We don't do that typically. We look at the recovery process as a passive sort of time in between the workouts and it's the workouts that make you fit. But it's actually not so. The workouts are crucial, but the recovery is the equal counterpart to the workouts. That's it. I think I made a lot of sense. What do you think? Do you think I made sense? If you're interested in coaching, of course, I offer customized training plans and consultations and subscriptions. If you want to just have a monthly custom plan that evolves with you, constantly changing, adapting to wherever you're at in your training. I offer that. There's a link in the description. It goes to my website where you can read more about it. In the meantime, please subscribe, leave a comment, give it a like, share with your friends, although all those, you know, magical calls to actions that I always put in the videos, but they actually make a big difference if you share and like and all that stuff that actually makes a difference in how this channel grows. So I appreciate your time that you're watching this video. I hope you got something out of it. And I look forward to talking to you in the next video. Bye bye now.