Active recovery, sleep tracking, mobility training, mindfulness, floating. There’s more talk about recovery today than ever before. For the everyday Jane and Joe the whole concept of recovery might seem unimportant – if you go to the gym 3-4 times a week, surely you don’t need to think about recovering from it? This is the part that most starting athletes overlook. I’ll tell you my story.

New motivator

When I started CrossFit 4 years ago I thought it would be an excellent way to lose those extra few pounds I was still carrying from pregnancy, and I fell in love with the intensity of the sport. Before CF I was a so-called cardio bunny; I had mostly done group training, everything from “Bootylicious” (yes, that’s right) to BodyPump and indoor cycling with the sole attention to stay thin. My success was measured in my reflection in the mirror.

With CrossFit, my attitude towards training changed. I wanted to be better at this constantly varied sport. I started to pay attention to my progress and performance, not so much my weight on the scale (which was going up along with my appetite). The thirst to be better was intoxicating! I wanted to do that first workout RX’ed, snatch more than just the bar, get that first pull-up. That’s all I cared about – getting better constantly and having new achievements to write on the PR board.

I wasn’t paying much attention to how my body felt. I went to train even if my body was still aching from yesterday’s WOD. I’d do a benchmark wod rx’ed even if my heart rate was up from that day’s meetings and I hadn’t eaten since lunch. I trained Monday to Friday five days in a row determined to get all the workouts of the programming done. During metcons it was always “all in”, there was no in-between. Unfortunately I didn’t have any background in competitive sports, so I didn’t know that recovery was the one aspect of training that I was dangerously over-looking on an everyday basis.

Neglecting the signals

For about 2 years I was able to train like that, until my back said snap. It didn’t happen deadlifting my 1RM, it happened when I was lifting my 2-year old son from the ground. This incident forced me to come face-to-face with the concept of recovery, and how important it is for your performance.

“The development happens when you rest.” Sure, I’d heard about it, just hadn’t paid any attention to it. At this time of my life I was raising a kid, almost never sleeping uninterrupted for more than a few hours. Soon after, I was returning to work from maternity leave and suddenly had a lot of work-related stress. And finally, we had decided to open our own CrossFit gym and become part-time entrepreneurs. All the while fitting in 5-6 training sessions a week and my eyes constantly fixed on hitting new achievements and PRs.

I was diagnosed with a ruptured intervertebral disc. I had ignored all the symptoms of muscle pain, fatigue, and instead kept on going, not just in training but generally in life. The first doctor I went to see told me to forget about weightlifting for the rest of my life and do “other sports”. I went to my coach crying and determined to do everything in my willpower to get better. He forced me to look at my life as a whole. Where was I? I had shit load of things going on in my life and I was doing training that was intended for competitors. My nervous system wasn’t getting any breaks and I was putting pressure on myself from every direction.

Bouncing back

Change doesn’t come overnight, and it took me a lot of sessions with different doctors, physicians and other experts to finally realize how much my body had been sending signals and responding to the overall overload of my life style. I changed my training program to 3-4 longer and slower-paced sessions a week with proper back and core activation, and put emphasis on recovery. I did hours of boring rehab exercises; not just to heal my back but to fix my posture, which was in one way putting wrong kind of pressure on my body. Sleeping at least 8 hours a day, no matter what. Food - eating enough and eating well enough, no more going to training with just a light lunch in my stomach. A lot of accessory work to make those small muscles in the body work like they are supposed to. Polishing technique with a “boring” empty barbell. Weightlifting twice a week and all-out metcons were wiped out from the weekly schedule and replaced with workouts that were challenging me in other ways. I still got to do benchmarks and other hard workouts, just not all the time every day and every week.

I learned to listen to my body and think about pacing, do a workout at 80% capacity. I started to add long walks to my schedule, and even tried to add small moments of mindfulness to my daily schedule. The hardest thing was to change the mindset, though. Come in terms with the fact that if I wasn’t living the life of a competitive athlete, how could I expect myself to perform like one? I was a mother, a worker, a part-time entrepreneur, perhaps for me it was enough to stay healthy and enjoy this awesome sport, after all I wasn’t trying to qualify for the Games.

Funnily enough, dialing back the intensity and the overall amount of training made me perform much better at those times when I needed to give that 110%. My PRs were still going up but my body was not in pain all the time. The time I took from training to recovery was giving me room and tools to develop. My advice? Sometimes the most RX’ed thing you can do is pay a little extra attention to your recovery process. You’ll be amazed how much it affects your performance. Take it from one rx-holic to another!