SERIOUS TRAINING 31

In last week’s SERIOUS TRAINING 30 I mentioned that this week I would address specific types of recovery, such as recovery on demand and scheduled recovery. But I’ve realized that would be a step too far too soon. I think it’s important to get a better grasp on the concept of managing stress in training. That’s where I want to take you this week. I’ll come back to the details of recovery next week.

The bottom line from last week was this: Stress is your body’s reaction to the biological, psychological, and sociological (biopsychosocial) challenges you face in daily life. When those stressors become overwhelming, everything suffers—including your training and race performance.

Last week I explained that stress is often the product of too many competing challenges. Career demands, financial concerns, time pressures, and family responsibilities are common sources. Of all the stressors in your daily life, the one you probably have the greatest control over is your training. It needs to fit within your lifestyle—not compete with it.

Something has to give when stress accumulates. The greater your total lifestyle stress, the lower your training load may need to be.

Training excessively—too much volume, intensity, and/or frequency—is also a stressor. When added to an already demanding life, it puts not only race performance at risk, but also your overall well-being.

Here’s the conundrum. Managing sport-related stress doesn’t mean every workout should be short, easy, and infrequent. Fitness improves only when training gradually imposes greater stress on the body. Without a progressive increase in training stress, there is little adaptation. That’s the problem you need to solve.

The challenge is that many already-stressed athletes continue piling training stress on top of life stress. The solution isn’t to stop training—it is to build frequent recovery into the process, so your body has the opportunity to adapt.

Let’s take deeper look at managing stress through recovery to produce fitness.