Active Recovery/Rest Week

[Brooks Modie]

Hopefully this will spawn some good insight as to how people recover and build off of their training plans.

I am a believer in active recovery. That is during my rest week I don't completely sit out and wait until next weeks training begins. Rather, I scale back on the intensity and duration for a given workout. For example, instead of a 1 hour run, I would scale back to about 40 minutes and keep the intensity at a very easy level.

Is this along the lines of what others do? Also, for cycling, where the body is stressed to a lesser degree, is it necessary to scale back or can I simply scale back on my running per the example above?

[Aussie Rob]

I do it the same as you Brooks, and even in a rest week ill still ride hard with the Wednesday Spin ride (God i miss summer already).

I found it hard to get true "rest" weeks though last summer with the epics and century rides etc....so i ended up giving myself rest days. ie - long ride sunday, easy mon/tues, ride hard wednesday, easy thur/fri. I think it still gave my body the break it was looking for that way.

[robreddy]

swim more = best active recover you can do

[jimdehner]

Brooks - I use a 3 week build cycle followed by a recovery week - the recovery is 50-60% of the last week of the build volume - depending on the time of the year I will include some intensity but at the lower volume

[Andy Cornwell]

I do a 3/1 during the winter, and then switch to a 2/1 (build weeks / recovery weeks).

In the summer, as intensity goes up, I find that it's easier for me, mentally, to commit to my high-intensity workouts if my recovery week is tangibly close. Also, the high intensity workouts-- especially tempo runs and track work, I think-- require more recovery than the purely aerobic work that dominates the winter.

I got turned on to this idea a few years ago, and really like it.