Skills

In response to a question from yesterday's post on how much recovery is needed, think about the following principles. Recovery of tisssues involves the muscle, connective tissue, cardiopulmonary and joints. Tissues within the body heal at different rates. In general, it is appropriate to train more often than one time per week per muscle group. CrossFit movements are generally from core to extremity and are compound in their nature and not isolated single muscle group training oriented. So, there is potentially a greater force development, but the force is dispersed over a larger surface area of muscle fibers and actual muscle groups. Compound movements are more balanced and promote a more natural or "functional" training model.

Recovery of muscle tissues should be guided by general time frames but more on athlete perception and performance. If the athlete has minimal soreness, a readiness to train and no limit in motion, let's train! This might be 1 day, 2 days or 5 days after the last training session for a particular set of muscle groups. The article sited in yesterday's blog is more focusing on a "body building" model of training where there is concentrated isolation of simple movements involving less joints. When there is this type of simple movement focus, the loads and "damage" to the tissues can be greater and require more recovery. But, the over reaching principle here is to listen to our bodies for performance and readiness! If your loads are decreasing over time and your desire overall is less to train, you may need rest. Rest can come in the form of active recovery with lighter loads, Metcon or skill work or true rest with no exercise intervention.