The Importance of Rest & Recovery in Triathlon Training

Rest and recovery is an essential part of a training week yet it seems it’s often harder for triathletes to rest and recover properly than it is to train!

As highly motivated athletes who want to be the best you can be, it’s very easy to fall into the mindset that if you’re not training, you’re not improving.

Here’s Coach Rob explaining why that’s not the case…

In Team Oxygenaddict we really push the need to take your prescribed rest days / recovery sessions as just that. Otherwise your body will struggle to make the adaptations and improvements in fitness that you desire and deserve – because that’s what it requires for that.

Rest & recovery doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing though. Our sessions might involve a shorter, and DEFINITELY easier swim / bike. Such sessions are designed to promote blood flow to your muscles to help with recovery. You’ll often feel much better at the end of these sessions than you did at the start.

Think of them as a free massage!

Related to this, and a topic that crops up a lot in Team Oxygenaddict is the mindset of missing sessions.

That is, the mindset that if you missed a session one day, the logical thing to do is to add it onto the following day’s training schedule. It most definitely isn’t the thing to do!

The majority of us are balancing work, family and life in general with training. Inevitably then, there will be days where sessions are missed. It’s not the end of the world.

Stacking multiple days worth of sessions into a single day typically means you don’t get the desired training benefit from each individual session. Typically athletes under perform in those sessions and often tire themselves out having a knock on effect on upcoming sessions.

Team Oxygenaddict athletes often post their situations in our Facebook group – with the assumption that their recovery day should be scrapped in favour of the missed session. Or that a hard session can be squeezed in somewhere to make up for missing a session.

The advice from me is usually always the same. That is, in terms of the bigger picture of your training goals and plan, there’s no benefit (and often a detriment) to foregoing recovery days or finding a way to fit extra hard sessions in in the short term.

So as well as providing you with a training plan relative to your goals, ability, experience and available time to train, we’re also there to help stop you making bad training decision that can lead to fatigue, overtraining, or injury.

If that sounds like you, why not see how we can help you get the most out your training for the coming season!