Conditioning Research, loving this blog.
I’ve been spending more and more time on Conditioning Research. It’s a good mix of fitness and nutrition talk.
Recently, there was a post about recovery, specifically active versus passive recovery. The highlights as Chris points out are:
- Playing a match led to immediate decreases in performance in e.g. sprint performance, jumping and strength;
- The match also produced markers of muscle damage;
- The first thing that recovered was sprint performance;
- The last thing that came back to normal was jump performance which was still diminished even when muscle soreness had disappeared; So, even when you are no longer sore, you may not have fully recovered.
- The effect was not cumulative – i.e., the performance after the 2nd match was not worse than after the first.
So even if you’re not hurting and feeling good, you may not be back to your potential. The jump performance coming back last is particularly disappointing when put in the context of an Ultimate Frisbee tournament where you’re playing 4 games on a Saturday. Maybe that explains our lack of success last year. :)