The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

These Habits Are Quietly Killing Your Recovery

• CTS • Season 6 • Episode 305

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0:00 | 16:04

Recovery isn’t just about what happens right after training, it’s about all the little things between sessions that add up. In this episode, CTS Coach Adam Pulford breaks down the habits that quietly interfere with adaptation and leave athletes carrying more fatigue than they realize.

We cover sleep, fueling, easy day intensity, stress management, post-workout recovery, and why the basics matter far more than expensive recovery gadgets or trends.

HOST

Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Why You Feel Constantly Tired

SPEAKER_00

If you're always tired, it's not your training. It's what's happening between training sessions that's tripping you up. Bad habits quietly kill your recovery. And recovery is what makes you better from all the hard training that you put in. I'm Adam Pulford, head cycling coach at CTS. Today let's talk about the habits that limit your recovery and trade the bad habits for good ones so you can keep making the gains that you expect. To get grounded, I want to remind everyone of the most simple equation on how training actually works. Stress plus rest equals adaptation. This is where training is your stress. Rest is kind of anything that you're doing while you're not training. And adaptation is the gains made. Our end goal for getting stronger, faster, smarter, more durable, becoming a better athlete. A good athlete will have good recovery habits. Champions of this sport, and every sport at the highest level, will be fanatical about recovery because they know that's where the gains are made. They have their life dialed so that they can do the hard work, rest hard, and adapt as fast as possible. Now, I'm not here to preach about how you need post-ride massage, sleep 10 hours, and have chef-curated meals each day like the pros do. That would be nice though, wouldn't it? Most of us need to go to work, pick up the kids, get groceries, pay the bills, squeeze in our ride at some point between all of the meetings, and hope we get a solid six-ish hours of sleep. My intent is to not create anxiety about what you're not doing, that the pros probably are, but rather remind you of what real recovery is and how to clean up your habits to maximize the process for you. Here's the top five habits I see athletes doing that are quietly killing their recovery. Number one, doom scrolling before bed. This is the lowest hanging fruit of them all. If you're doing this, you are a dummy. Stop scrolling before bed. When it comes to recovery, sleep is king. Screens, social media stimulus, and all the weird psychological implications from that garbage have been proven to kill sleep scores. If you're sacrificing sleep for the socials, you're limiting your recovery and you are literally making yourself tired in the worst possible of ways. So what to do instead is literally almost anything. Read a book, listen to relaxing music, meditate, breathe, stare at a wall, count the sheep. I don't really care. So long as it's not a screen and it's not anything social media related. 30 minutes before bed, start winding it down. Longer if you can, but at least 30 minutes away from the TV, phone, and anything connected to the internet. Sleep in a cold, dark, quiet room and aim for as many hours of continuous sleep as possible. And build up to eight hours if you can. Number two, not relaxing after your hard workouts. This is a tricky one and one habit that I'm actually kind of terrible at. Busy people got stuff to do. I get it. And recovery doesn't always have to be perfect, but when you can, find 20 to 30 minutes to chill and relax after your hard training sessions. Well, what's hard? I mean, the days where you're doing intervals, you hit the group ride, race, or you go super long, that's hard. When you feel smoked, that's when you went hard. Specifically, it does depend on your current fitness level, and one person's hard isn't always another person's hard. For example, uh, Matthew Vanderpool's hard day would probably leave me at the side of the road, half dead part way through, and I'd have to ride the couch for a week to likely recover and get my TSB back up to some functional level. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. But some solid advice here is if you're doing intervals at zone four and above, or you're hitting RPEs of seven out of ten or higher for extended periods of time and are hitting big TSSs for you on that ride, that's a hard day. Plan your hard rides in your training program so you know where they're coming. And if you can, plan some chill time in your personal schedule after those sessions. Here's my general advice. During the weekdays, use your calendar to block 30 minutes post-ride so you don't have to rush to a meeting and maybe actually have time to eat your food without having to mute yourself while chewing or go off camera to scarf some food real quick. If you work out after work, try getting her done and get the meal in at least 90 minutes, if not longer, before your bedtime so that you have time to cool down, relax, and digest before the real recovery happens in bed. On the weekend, take a nap or meditate after your long rides. Don't just charge into the honeydew list and get the kids to the soccer game first thing after your ride. I call this time traveling through life. And you just get super tired from it. Plan and communicate with your family when you need. And as little as 30 minutes of downtime to put up your legs and chill can go a hell of a long way to make you feel more restored and enhance the recovery process after these big rides. Number three, not eating after your hard workout or a race. This is just too easy to get right. Just put some calories in your face. This may require some planning ahead with meal prep or food ordering, but it's just being organized. The post-workout recovery window is definitely a thing, and you will recover faster if you get carbs plus protein into your gut 45 to 60 minutes post-workout or post-race. After hard days and hard races, I'd highly recommend getting this dialed. For both my juniors and masters, I encourage them to bring lunch. That's either just a simple sandwich or leftovers from the night before to eat after the race. Oftentimes, the race may be in some remote location where you can't hit a Chipotle or something convenient afterwards. Maybe there's some local fruit food trucks, but they don't always have athlete focused in mind. So plan ahead, bring some healthy food, be boring, and eat your food before your podium ceremony to maximize recovery. One other thing here, and this gets back to my anti-anxiety messaging. If you miss that recovery window for some reason, or there's no food option because maybe you got to hit the road to get to the airport, or maybe uh post-workout you have to go right into a meeting. Don't freak. If you eat within two to three hours or uh some point later on, your body will still actually recover. It'll replenish glycogen, rehydrate, and you'll still make gains. It's just if you hit that food window within 45 to 60 minutes, it'll go a lot quicker. And if you're racing again the next day or if you have another hard workout, eating post-ride will set you up for the best success. And it's a good habit to get into because that's when your body is looking to soak up the macronutrients best. Full glycogen replenishment takes about 24 to 48 hours in most people. 24 hours if you're dialed, 48 hours if you drag it out. Other pro tips here: keep some snacks at your work desk so you always have some calories available. Ideally, you get in a mix of protein and carbs and a little fat too with those snacks. Protein bars are balanced ratios most of the time of the macronutrients, and they're good. They're more portable than a recovery shake, especially if you forget the bottle or don't have liquid available to shake it up. Cooking on the weekends and midweek so that you have leftovers is the way I do it. So there's always some healthy food as a quick option. Food is fuel, and you need to fuel to train hard and recover like a champ. Number four, not going easy on your easy days. Honestly, if more people would actually do this, they would see amazing results. Most people go too hard on their easy days, which leads to more fatigue than planned. Then they can't go as hard as needed on the hard days, resulting in poor training quality and not the best results they could have. This is a super common problem for most amateurs and masters athletes. It has to deal with a lack of discipline, lack of trust in the program, and not knowing how to adjust when life forces a change in the program. But when life forces the change, it's best to have individualized training to best provide advice here. But if you zoom out, there still should be some easy days in the program, no matter the change, and that's the main point. So let's discuss that more. Going easy on your easy days means whatever plan you have to follow should have rest days and easy spins throughout the week. And then actually do them. Plan them is a really good first step in the recipe to success here. For most people I coach, it's like one rest day and two to three days easy and two to three days hard or long rides. Uh, how easy is easy? Well, easy spins or active recovery rides should be at efforts of one to two on the scale of one to ten. That means if one is the easiest effort you can do on your bicycle and ten is the hardest, you're spending your time between one and two. So super easy. The power should be below 55% of your FTP. For someone who's got a functional threshold power of 250 watts, that means your zone one recovery is at 140 watts or below. The heart rate should be below 68% of your threshold heart rate. So that's like 112 beats per minute if your threshold heart rate is about 165. My coaching philosophy is most recovery rides are between 45 to 90 minutes for most everyone. Spend more time than that, you're just wasting time. Spend less time than that, you probably would have gotten more benefit from just taking a nap or going for an easy walk rather than kidding up and going for a ride. Even for my professional athletes, 90 minutes, maybe two hours at zone one is all they need for active recovery. More than that, and we're just again wasting our energy and our time. Because if recovery is the goal, short rides and then some good relaxation time is better than longer time at zone one. For time-crunched athletes, you still need easy days, but maybe you only have one easy spin because you probably have two rest days, more than likely, which leaves four days of zone two and higher to keep the fitness moving forward. And number five, allowing negative stress in. This is a bigger one than we probably think. And I'm just a lowly coach here, I'm not a psychologist or an expert of the mind. However, I can definitely tell when there is some negative life stress in my life and when there's not. Negative stressors are the things that bring you down. And you know what? There's sometimes you just can't avoid it. For example, the news. The news kind of bums me out pretty much every day. But I listen to it, I watch, and I stay informed, but I try not to let it rent space for free in my head. The advice here is to look at your life, see where the negative stress or thoughts are coming from, and try to get rid of the stuff that doesn't need to be there. The biggest culprit of negative stress in working with athletes that I see are the stories we tell ourselves. The negative stories. As athletes, we tell ourselves that we're not fit enough, we're not strong enough, we always get dropped, or whatever the voices are saying next. Think about your thoughts for a minute. You can probably come up with at least three negative thoughts right away, right now. It's crazy how good we are at that. But stop. Just stop letting those negative thoughts control you. They're just thoughts. They have zero control over you. Just view them as thoughts and let them drift out of your head just as they drift in. Then when the good ones come in, grab those and do some good stuff with them. It's as simple as that. Notice I say simple. This is not easy, but it's simple. And it's gonna take practice, maybe some meditation, practicing mindfulness, and a daily practice of not letting the shit of life get you down. But it's totally worth it. I've linked to some books below that will help with this. And if you really have nothing to do with endurance or athletics, but they work for performance, and when it comes to mindset, they're amazing. I have a link there too for a great sports psychologist if you think you need some work there. I'm just scratching the surface of what a powerful, negative, thought-free mind can do for you. So take this advice and run with it. Explore it if you never have before. Read books like Loving What Is by Byron Cady, The Power of Habit by Charles Deweig, or Atomic Habits by James Clear. There's some life-changing stuff in there, and maybe even more powerful than the hot takes I'm giving you on endurance athlete recovery. Now, before we wrap up, notice one big thing here. I haven't mentioned using anything like infrared sauna treatments, cold plunges, cryotherapy, neuromuscular stimulating devices, or even compression boots. Why? Because most of that stuff doesn't really work in speeding up recovery. And if they do, it's marginal gains at best. In fact, not many things actually speed up recovery for endurance athletes. Recovery timelines are longer than we want them to be, but physiologically kind of set in place for good reason. And speeding them up is kind of a misnomer. You can't really speed them up, but you can do plenty of things to slow them down, like the bad habits that we talked about today. If you want to learn more about why some of these fancy gadgets do or don't work for recovery, reply in the comment section with tell me more, and I'll work on a specific content piece about that. If you want to do a deep dive right now, check out my episode with Christy Eschwanden, who wrote the book on all things recovery called Good to Go. Links for that are also below. Final word here is we humans are just a bundle of habits. I'd say it's better to be a bunch of good habits versus bad habits, especially when it comes to recovery for performance, and maybe being a good person too. So look, if you're being honest with yourself, you probably have identified at least one or two of these habits that are quietly working against you. The good news? Every single one of them is fixable. No expensive gadgets required, just a little intention between your sessions. And if you want someone in your corner helping you put all of this together, that's exactly what a CTS coach will do for you. We'd look at the full picture and help you make sure that every hard session you put in actually turns into gains that you're after. Click the link below in the description. And if you'd like to schedule a free consultation, learn more there. Remember, stress plus rest equals adaptation. You're already doing the stress part. Let's make sure the rest of the equation is working for you. Train hard, recover harder, and I'll see you in the next one.

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Adam Pulford

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