Posted: July 17, 2006

Multisport: Rest in a High Octane World

By Gordon Paulson, USAC Certified PCG Coach - The Peaks Coaching Group, Inc.

Rest. In our modern high speed broadband, wi-fi, HDTV enabled world, there seems to be little emphasis on the concept of ‘rest’. In the high octane world of competitive cycling ‘rest’ is one of those 4 letter words that we don’t want to utter in mixed company. If your experience is like mine, you’ve found that the athletes you coach are not very interested in talking about their rest and recovery days. They would much rather talk about intervals, improving CP numbers, TSS and power profiles. But, when the conversation turns to quality rest, you can almost see the interest fading. This is an attitude I try to change.

My personal philosophy is, do the hardest things first. This is one concept that my dad passed along to me that I have found most rewarding. Do first those things you’d prefer to do last. Translated to this topic, rest is a topic that I try to emphasize with my athletes from the very start of their coaching experience. You can imagine some of the thoughts crossing their mind. “Why am I paying this guy to tell me to nap more?” The first challenge then, is to get your athletes to buy in to the concept, not just intellectually, but to make it an integral part of how they approach their training. To accomplish this, I found it helps to educate my athletes about how rest fits in to the performance equation. They need to understand the process of pushing past their limits, and recovering to a new fitness level. They should be told how their muscles rebuild when they’re sleeping. In fact, I try very hard to convince them that it’s the ‘secret weapon’ that may very well spell the difference between racing like they have always raced, and taking their performance to the next level.

After you’ve gotten your athlete to buy in to the concept that they must plan and execute quality rest, you’ll find that the next challenge will be to convince them that they must structure their rest periods as true rest and recovery. I’ve encountered a number of interesting uses of an athlete’s “rest” day. There was the 20-something firefighter who ‘only’ did his weight lifting on his rest day. As he explained to me he just didn’t have enough time on the days when he trained on the bike to work in his weight work. I ‘also had another athlete who convinced me that he could do ‘recovery rides’ instead of a true, ‘off the bike’ rest day. That lasted until his second 800kj one-hour ‘recovery’ ride. The power meter saved that guy. When we worked together to set a reasonably true ‘recovery’ ride kilo joule level, he started to experience the kind of recovery he needed. As I start working with an athlete I try to get a good picture of what his or her week looks like. And one of the first things I’m looking for is the day of the week that fits best in the picture as the mandatory ‘rest’ day. While Mondays often work well for many people, especially during the work week, a lock-step approach is not a good idea. I try to discuss the idea of rest with the athlete in part so I can understand the demands that are placed upon the individual and, in part because I want to sell the idea of the importance of rest to the athlete.

One athlete I coached was in the medical profession. Following my lock-step approach I scheduled her to take Monday’s off the bike. And she was a disciplined athlete. She followed the plan and stayed off her bike on Mondays. The problem was her job. She was a nurse, and she worked long stressful hours in the hospital, often on Mondays. She wasn’t getting quality rest and recovery on any days of the week. Needless to say, the problems with this schedule showed up quickly. In order to accommodate the challenges of her flexible schedule it was necessary to avoid a set rest day, while always putting it in to each week. She had to rest on different days of the week each week, but her schedule was built around that all important rest. As she settled in to the type of a schedule, her performance improved, and she felt rested enough to really do those intervals with a lot of intensity.

Another case history for the need to rest came from a 60-something athlete. This guy was retired and could train any and every day scheduled. He was highly motivated, and very, very disciplined. He trained 6 days a week and was careful to follow the script. He never did more than two hard days in a row, he took it easy on recovery rides, he logged lots of miles and introduced a level of intensity in to his training that he was never previously able to attain. And his results slipped. After a great deal of study and analysis, and a fair amount of trial and error, we discovered that he needed more than 1 day off his bike. After we added a second rest day to his regimen his results improved. I’m sure that, as a master’s level racer, he simply had different recovery demands than what you might expect a 23 year old cat-1 racer might need. This doesn’t mean that every master level racer over 50 years old should only train 5 days a week, but it does mean that, as coaches, we need to consider the possibility that it’s the rest cycle, rather than the intervals, that holds the key to success.

So back to my 20 something rider who wanted to do his 800kj ‘recovery’ ride. Just before we nailed down the rest issue, he did a time trial and did reasonably well. He averaged a respectable 302 watts in a 39 minute TT with an average speed of 25.2 mph. However, at about 10 miles in to his race he displayed a very noticeable drop off in HR, power and speed.

Shortly after that we adjusted his rest days to insure that he really did get meaningful rest every week. A little more than three weeks later, properly rested, and recovered, this same athlete completed a time trial with an average 26.2 mph and 311 watts on a very similar profile course. Rest made the difference. By resting more, he was stronger and faster and, not surprisingly, went from 4th place to 1st.

This time you can see that he was able to put forth a very strong final effort. So, if you want to give your athletes an edge, tell them to ‘give it a rest’.

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