My main aim in this post is to provide some useful information for everyone, not just for athletes. I talk in a very simple and simplified manner, trying to avoid anything that is too technical, and I try my best to explain certain complex theories in very basic terms, as I believe this is a very important subject for EVERYONE to be aware of.
Yet, as much as there is a lot of information that can be used for everyone, even those who don't do sports or just starting, I believe that some of the information here is also crucial for anyone doing sports, especially those who want to improve and who would consider themselves to be at a more advanced level.
Please note that, since I am trying to simplify the subject, some parts may not be complete, just to avoid complicating things. I am more than happy to discuss the subjects mentioned here in much more detail with anyone who may be interested.
I shall start off by giving a general explanation about the body, what is healthy, what is unhealthy, and how we can help the body be at an optimal state. From my point of view, a healthy body is one that is able to do an average effort, while being able to regenerate quickly and efficiently, without feeling like it is too much work. It is a body that can live longer with the least amount of avoidable diseases. And I guess the keyword here is "avoidable"...
So, how do we achieve this? There are 3 main components that need to be satisfied in order to get to a healthy body:
1. Nutrition
2. Exercise
3. Recovery
A lot of articles, including some of my posts on this blog, speak about nutrition as well as exercise. It is rare, though, that we find anything written about recovery, especially in the non-sporting sphere, although I believe it is crucial to being healthy. So, what is it? What are we recovering from, even if we're not exercising?
I am sure that, at some point in time, you have experienced muscle fatigue in one way or another. If you do not do sports, imagine maybe being on holiday and walking for several hours, or if you do sports, you have done a very long and/or intense session, which left you not just feeling tired, but you could actually feel your muscles ache. What happens during such an event is that your muscles, when they reach a certain level of exhaustion, they start to break down little by little. How much and how fast this break down happens depends largely on your level of fitness and the nutrition prior to and during the effort you have been making. If left unattended to, this break-down of muscle fibres can lead to temporary damage, or if it is done over and over without the right recovery, it can lead to more longer term damage. The damage can be in the form of torn muscle tissues, or even the reduction in the muscle mass itself.
Some might start thinking that, in order to avoid this from happening, maybe we should just avoid making effort or doing sports. But, this is even worse. Muscles will lose mass if they are not used, and this becomes even more important when a person advances in age, since muscles that lose mass do not gain it back as quickly as when one is younger.
What is wrong with losing muscle mass? Simply, if you are going to ignore all the muscle functions in the body, such as what they do in your arms and legs, you need to not ignore your heart! The heart is a muscle, and it needs to be treated in the same way we treat all other muscles in the body. This means, in theory, that if we do not train the heart muscle, it will start to lose mass, which means that it becomes weaker, and this means a reduction in life expectancy. How do we train the heart muscle? Cardiovascular exercise (sports that get the heart pumping).
With this in mind, you need to think about how your other muscles feel when you exercise as well. Imagine when you haven't done any sports for a very long time, and then you decide to go running a long distance or lift heavy weights immediately. What happens, usually, is that you may get a cramp, your muscles will ache more than usual, and you might end up injuring yourself. Now, remember that the heart is also a muscle, so you don't want to do too much too soon, so as to avoid the heart muscle from cramping, aching or getting damaged either. It all needs to be done gradually.
Now that we have established that exercise will help with the improvement of muscles, we need to also make sure that we deal with the muscle break-down that happens during exercise. The muscle regeneration process is the most important part that will actually lead to the muscles growing, or avoiding the muscles getting smaller and/or weaker. This regeneration is taken care of during recovery. Muscle recovery involves the right nutrition at the right time, making sure the body gets fed proteins within a specified period after an effort to help muscle regeneration (and with carbohydrates as well in some instances). Recovery also involves rest, and most importantly sleep! This is how muscles, and the whole body, will be able to sustain a healthy life.
How important recovery is seen by scientists and sports people can be emphasised, unfortunately, by looking at doping in sports. The largest part of most doping cases involve drugs that help the person recover faster. Faster recovery means that the person will have fresh muscles quickly that they can train harder and longer on, hence giving them an unfair advantage over others who do not use the illegal substances that help with such quick recovery. If you can imagine, for example, a normal endurance athlete's training cycles, where they train hard for 2-3 weeks, making advances of about 2-3% per week then have to recover for one week before resuming hard training for another 2-3 weeks, and so on, with taking such illegal substance to promote testosterone generation in the body (a very important hormone for recovery), the training periods may be much longer and recovery periods can be minimised, which means much bigger improvements over the same period, since the body has been helped to recover quicker.
While on the subject of doping, we can also explain some other aspects of it. So, not just recovery is a part of doping, but also how the body deals with delivering oxygen to the muscles. If you have ever gone to a town at altitude or have been trekking in the mountains and tried to make some effort, you might have experienced a bit of weakness that you're not normally used to. This is because of a reduction of the amount of oxygen going to your muscles. Our muscles need oxygen to function, which is why when we make hard effort we tend to breathe more heavily, so that we can help deliver more oxygen to the muscles to be able to function. Oxygen is transported through the blood via haemoglobin. The more oxygen is delivered to the muscles, the more sustained effort one can make before fatigue kicks in. Again, there are certain illegal substances that those who dope in sports use to promote this oxygen delivery to the muscles via increasing the haemoglobin, hence having an unfair advantage over those who do it using natural and legal methods.
So, by looking at sports people and sports science, we can learn a lot about how we can stay healthy, not just to break world records, but to also make sure that our bodies keep functioning in an optimal way for as long as possible. There are many natural and legal ways that help with recovery as well as endurance, and they do not always involve taking pills! Simple ways such as eating beetroot or liver, or maybe adding some powdered maca plant to breakfast cereal can help a great deal. Maybe it can also be a matter of avoiding certain foods or adding certain drinks to one's daily eating routine that would help improve the body's ability to generate and regenerate the right cells at the right places.
For some people who do sports, especially those who do it simply to stay fit, recovery is almost never part of their routine, which can be damaging, as I explained above. Starting with recovery nutrition, this needs to be an integral part of any sports programme, and not just an additional bolt-on that one thinks that only the pros should do it. Yes, it is important for the pros, but it is as important for EVERYONE else! Moreover, it has to be part of the overall nutrition routine, and not just an add-on that is done on top of the daily meals.
A sports person will not improve by simply going about their training trying to increase volume and/or intensity every week without rest, and they will certainly be doing more harm than good if they skip their post-session recovery, whether this is nutrition or rest.
As for a person who doesn't do sports regularly, if one wants to stay healthy, there are certain minimums that one should do, and these include exercising the muscles, including the heart, in order to keep the body healthy. And, this becomes more important the more advanced in age one gets! Moreover, with training the muscles, recovery needs to be taken care of in order to make sure that the muscles are regenerated and that the body gets the long-term benefit of the health and fitness routine it goes through.
Hoping that I have answered all the questions I have received in the above, two last questions I got regarding the subject that were not answered were, one regarding recovery and the other regarding doping. Starting with the recovery question, that asked how long it takes for a person to having to start from scratch after stopping for a while (basically a long recovery period), and the answer to that, as always: it depends. But, in general, a halt in training for 2 weeks will probably not result in a noticeable drop in muscular strength, but it could have an effect on endurance, which will then need to be rebuilt, though this might not take very long before one gets back to the same endurance level as before the 2 week break.
The second question was regarding whether doping has recently decreased compared to what it used to be like in the past, and the simple answer to this is yes. The fact is that, while doping is still happening, it has become more of a taboo over recent years than it used to be in the past. Moreover, doping detection science has advanced, as well as the anti doping agencies becoming more systematic about their testing, increasing their testing outside of competition, and not just limiting testing to competition times as the case used to be in the past. This doesn't mean that there aren't some who will always do whatever it takes to use illegal performance enhancing substances, but just by looking at performance records of sports such as cycling and short distance running, we can see times not being broken by the huge margins we used to witness in the past, and, in some instances, even times are dropping significantly, and most of this, I believe, is due to the drop in doping.
I hope you have found some of the information here of use. I would love to hear your questions and comments, so please feel free to share them here, or you can always send me an email or a message on my Facebook page.
Thanks!
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