Supplements Two Oceans Marathon Training Guide 2018 | Page 53

INJURY-PREVENTION
Essential Rest & Recovery
What is the most important part of a training
programme? If you answered quality work,
speed work, long slow running, hill repeats
or strength work, or any combination thereof,
you’d be wrong. These are all important
aspects of a training programme, but the most
important element is recovery. It’s only during
recovery that we gain the benefits we seek from
hard workouts. - BY RAY ORCHISON
T
he body is an incredible creation, with many
built-in sensors and monitors designed to ensure
that the cells and internal systems func tion at
an optimal level, otherwise known as homeostasis. The
moment we take the body above this optimal level,
however, alarms begin to trigger. For example, if you
ran an easy 30 minutes on a cool day, you’d handle
the session with no problems, but if you attempted
the same 30-minute easy run in a sauna, you would
suddenly find yourself struggling to finish. This is
because the high temperatures and humidity in the
sauna together with your work rate causes your core
temperature and that of your cells to rise above the
normal prescribed range. Your body then goes into
a state of panic and forces you to either slow down
or stop completely, so that homeostasis can be
maintained.
DOING IT THE RIGHT WAY
Why am I telling you this? Simple, because this has
significant implications when it comes to training. The
body will only maintain the resources it feels are needed
in order to survive, which basically means that if we
keep doing the same things we’re currently doing, we’ll
never improve. In order to improve we must therefore
push the body outside of the current homeostasis
level. When we do this, the body begins to create
more resources so that it is not placed under the same
stress next time round. This process is called super-
compensation.
The thing is this: One cannot simply keep pushing the
body each day and expect it to respond by simply
throwing more resources at the problem and shifting the
homeostasis levels. This approach will simply lead to a
breakdown of the body and it won’t be long before you
are injured, sick, have a stress fracture or find yourself
with overtraining syndrome. This is where rest and
recovery then come into the picture. When the body is
stressed, as in a hard training session, and a period of
recovery follows this stress, the body then adjusts to a
new prescribed or optimal homeostasis range.
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