From the team at CTS, this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time.

I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS.

In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches, and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be.

Now, on to our show.

What's the science behind recovery after a hard training session?

Like what happens within the body to make you recovered?

And is it the same process after a long ride?

Finally, how does that factor into the best training advice out there?

Welcome back, Time Crunch fans.

I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford.

Today we'll dive into the nitty-gritty of how your body actually recovers between training sessions, what happens under the hood of the endurance engine during the recovery process, and how you should plan training around it.

To do this best, we need some grounding of what recovery actually is.

And I'll admit, this can be real confusing because the fitness training and athlete industries out there, everyone seems to have a recovery product, pill, potion, or method that claims it promotes the best recovery.

And so it's gotten pretty murky out there.

So straight into the point, recovery is the restoration of performance capacity.

Plain and simple.

In endurance training and racing, this can happen relatively quickly.

In as little as four to six hours with good recovery habits, you can recover enough to do some high-quality training again.

Or in 24 to 48 hours, most will have full recovered performance capacity.

And this is what we call acute recovery.

This is what most of us are talking about when we refer to recovery after a training session.

Longer-term recovery still should have performance restoration as the objective, but it has longer timelines associated as well as some cognitive aspects like staleness or burnout, and will have some different physiological implications.

So to make it simple, I want all of us to think about recovery in two ways: long term and short term, or chronic recovery and acute recovery.

The goal of acute recovery is to bring your body back into a state of performing at normal capacities for future training sessions at really any intensity, or at least the intensity for the next planned session.

And this is usually the type of recovery most of us are referring to or trying to achieve in a weekly training cycle.

Acute recovery is what we'll primarily focus on today, though we'll touch on some longer-term scales as well.

So let's talk about the timeline of acute recovery.

What I'm going to do is walk you through what happens inside your body, starting from when you stop exercising and start the recovery process, going hour to hour of sorts until full recovery is attained.

I'm going to focus primarily on training sessions and races that last one to four hours, as that covers most of what all of you, our listeners, are coming across on a daily basis.

I'll speak to both low and high intensity training and sprinkle in some implications for big days, really hard races, and some strength training too.

So let's begin.

Zero to one hours.

This is where recovery starts, and it's measurable.

Heart rate, ventilation, rate of perceived effort all should start coming down.

You can track that with heart rate monitor, you can track that with new ventilatory measurements and rate of perceived effort.

Ask yourself, uh, are they going down?

Rehydration starts to occur if you're drinking water and taking in fluids.

Lactate levels start to decrease if you put in some high intensity in that session, and muscle acidity will start to diminish.

The recovery window is open and is most important in that first hour post-training when you want to speed up glycogen replenishment and rehydration as quickly as possible.

If you're doing two days or you have a hard session coming up in the next 24 hours, definitely take in carbs and fluids here.

If not, you don't really need to worry about it as much.

Next, from one to six hours, this is where metabolic recovery starts.

Glycogen resynthesis is starting to take place.

Hormone levels start to stabilize after aerobic training, but you could still have some uh elevated after high intensity.

Electrolytes are being absorbed, inflammation, part of the healing process, by the way, likely is increasing if you had a hard interval session or you were doing some near to failure efforts in the gym.

From 6 to 12 hours, electrolyte and hydration levels are nearly fully restored after an endurance ride.

Hormone levels like cortisol start to stabilize if you kept it aerobic.

Now, if you had a hard session in this after about six to twelve hours, hydration levels still could be compromised, so a little low, and cortisol levels could be elevated along with inflammation.

So for most people with good habits, four to six hours of recovery is what I would consider the minimum timeline of recovery before you train again, such as in two days.

This could be a cycling workout in the morning, strength training session in the afternoon, or vice versa, or you have two bike workouts in the same day.

Ideally, they are four to six hours apart, though.

You're trying to hit a session again when recovery is full enough to make sense, but not 100% to keep the training stress building for future adaptations.

Now let's assume you're a one-a-day training session type of athlete like me, and we're going to keep the recovery process going.

Let's talk about 12 to 24 hours.

At this point, muscle glycogen levels can be nearly fully restored if you had good nutrition habits even after an endurance ride that may have taken up to four hours.

If you did hard intervals, zone four and above is what I'm referring to there, glycogen levels may not be totally full, but maybe like 80%-ish full after 12 hours and getting close to full at 24 hours.

Hormone levels should restore, especially after an aerobic ride.

But again, depending on how intense or how deep you went, cortisol levels could still be slightly elevated at this point.

24 to 48 hours, full recovery should be in place unless the session was super long or super stressful.

However, this does depend on many factors, primarily good recovery habits, genetics, current fitness levels, and how long you've been training seriously, meaning years and years of training, or if you just started training seriously this year.

A more fit person will recover faster than a less fit person, but your own recovery process has its own timeline.

I'll speak to that more here in a minute.

But now finally, I it'd say 48 to 72 hours after something hard or long, but performance ability should be back to pretty much full capacity for normal, healthy athletes with good recovery habits for nearly any and all sessions.

So at that point, you should have full acute recovery.

And again, we're to we're talking, you know, a couple days here, uh, but still in the grand scheme of things, that is acute recovery in a nutshell.

Now let's talk about some training implications given all of that.

As you can see, full recovery for most sessions should occur after 24 hours of good recovery habits, and you can train again the next day.

With high intensity training, it may take up to 48 hours.

Aging can slow the recovery process down.

So for my older athletes, I rarely have them go back-to-back days with high intensity.

For younger athletes, this is fine, but based on the amount of life stress, you'll need to use trial and error to see if that works best for you.

Two a days are fine.

And even for the time-crunched athlete, this is an effective way to increase volume or training stress if you're limited on time per session.

And if you have those windows of time for multiple sessions in the same day, use two a days as a strategy.

Just know that nutrition and hydration habits are the most important for you when doing a quick turn and burn to another session.

So let's talk about the role of nutrition in recovery and what I mean by good habits.

First of all, carbohydrate is king.

For cycling performance, having enough glycogen on your human before you train is important.

During a ride, we consume carbohydrates to keep the energy high.

And after, we need to consume carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores during the recovery process so that we can come back and train the next day.

If you train once every two to three days and you're only doing short, like 45 to 75 minute sessions, carbohydrate ingestion may not be as crucial from a timing standpoint.

But if you train five to six days per week with high intensity, maybe two to three times per week, or you do a long ride as well on top of all that, and you live a busy life and are challenged to get ideal sleep, you need carbs.

With adequate carbohydrate ingestion and increased training, you can deplete glycogen stores over time, meaning over the over a week time period or a month time period, and thus you may decrease performance per session, not allowing for full training effects to occur.

Then training quality goes down.

Therefore, carbs are king when it comes to the performance world, even during recovery.

Hydration.

Hydration is crucial.

You can eat all you want, but digestion will slow down if you're dehydrated.

This is another way how you can slow down the recovery process is by being dehydrated.

You should aim to replace 150% of fluid weight that you lost in a training session to ensure proper hydration for recovery.

And you want to drink this back over the time course of six hours.

You don't want to just guzzle, I don't know, three pounds of water in uh in one hour because that doesn't lead to hydration.

You need to titrate it out, let your body absorb it over time, otherwise, it'll dump it all out.

For more details on this, like how to how to quantify it and how to stay hydrated after uh training sessions.

Uh go check out an article I have from Oscar Zhucendrup in the uh landing page for this, and I'll make sure it's clear where it's at.

But that that's a great source to make sure that you're hydrated between sessions.

Finally, protein.

Protein in the long term, as well as some of the short term, okay.

DOMS.

Many people know about delayed onset muscle soreness, and this can what that means is uh your muscles are sore.

Legs hurt after a training session, okay?

And this can start to occur in as little as 12 hours after a training session, but it usually peaks in the way of the maximum soreness about 24 to 48 hours after a session.

That's why they call it delayed onset muscle soreness.

It takes place uh many hours after you did the session.

This is caused by microtrauma in the muscles from stress, usually from strength training, running, or eccentric muscle actions.

But this can also happen from really high intensity training on the bike.

So taking in 20 to 30 grams of protein in that recovery window, so from zero to one hour after the hard bike session, that's gonna provide your body with uh enough of the uh amino acids and building blocks to build your muscles back better.

But again, you need to spread protein out throughout the day, and usually 20 to 30 gram dosages spread over 24 hours.

That's gonna provide your body with really good nourishment uh from the pro from the protein standpoint of building the muscles back.

Now I'm gonna make a bold statement here.

So hear me out.

You can't speed up recovery, but you can slow it down.

Many may argue with me on this one, but what I mean is that once you have these good habits dialed for fueling before, during, and after training, you reduce life stress so that you can recover best.

You sleep seven to nine hours per night, you eat a clean diet, all these good, boring things.

This is the point where you need to allow your body to simply do its thing.

Rest and let time heal all training fatigue.

Now, a few minutes ago, I did say that a more fit person will recover faster.

And it's true.

If you have a higher aerobic capacity and you have higher fitness levels, you will you will recover from training at all levels more quickly.

And good genetics play a role here, as I said.

But at the individual level and current moment in time, the rate of recovery is fixed for the individual athlete.

There are limits to the speed of recovery within the body, and you need to accept this.

From Tata Pagaccha all the way down to Joe Schmo, you all have your own recovery timeline set in place that in the moment you won't be able to speed that up.

Higher intensities and bigger stresses will take longer to recover for all athletes, but it's higher intensity and stress relative to the individual.

Take, for example, in Andy Coggin and Hunter Allen's book, Training and Racing with a Power Meter, they claim that around 350 TSS you will have uh degradation of performance decreases the next day.

Now, let's just say that 350 TSS comes from all intensity levels, and the athlete is gonna be uh in a state of malperformance, meaning their FTP is gonna go down, their power at VO2 may go down, and their sprint ability may go down.

That's what they're talking about there.

However, I have some athletes who are gonna crack and have performance mal, and they're gonna have malperformance implications after 200 TSS the next day.

This is where we come again to the individual level of things, and there's a spectrum of recovery ability that occurs with fitness level, all these aspects that I have been talking about on the podcast so far.

But my main point to all of this is at the physiological level, there are limited times where or time lines where your body will just need to need time in order to recover from what you did.

Okay, elite athletes typically do this better because of the fitness and the genetics and the time that they have, but everybody has a time-limited aspect to full recovery.

Okay.

And now you may be thinking, well, what about all these gadgets and devices out there?

Well, very few recovery modalities or gadgets actually speed up recovery.

Now you can listen to any one of my three podcasts with Christia Schwanden, who wrote the book on all things recovery, for more detail on that.

We discuss coal plunges, infrared saunas, tart cherry juice, and a ton of other things out there, mostly gimmicks.

Real recovery is real boring.

Hydrate, eat according to your training demands, sleep well, limit cognitive stress, and you'll be on the fast track to recovery.

However, there is no magic wand or pill that puts you on any faster than the fast track.

That's my point.

Now, longer-term recovery is still needed.

Fatigue can build up in the system through longer training blocks.

This is when recovery weeks or blocks are needed to bring down the built-up chronic fatigue so the body can come back to this normal uh performance ability.

Use this chronic recovery to battle the chronic fatigue, and you'll be successful.

I usually have a longer-term recovery block for my time-crunched athletes every three weeks or so.

And that block may be like five days total.

So two days rest, three days easy.

And this should shed most of that chronic fatigue.

For higher volume athletes, longer recovery time periods are needed, two weeks or perhaps even up to four weeks, depending on the level of chronic fatigue or goals that we have for that phase.

Peaking and tapering is a whole other topic, but uh longer timelines with specific goal sessions of volume and intensities to bring out a supercompensation effect is really what we're talking about during a tapering and peaking time period.

That means a specific way to recover and train to get really fast for a certain time, of which then that those adaptations diminish.

This, along with how the body actually adapts or makes gains, like I said, it's it's a whole other topic, okay, and a long one at that.

In the coming weeks, you'll hear several episodes about this and primarily about adaptation.

Okay.

We still need to do a peaking and tapering uh episode phase, and you'll you'll get that hopefully in 2026.

But the main point here is to say that recovery is not the same as adaptation.

However, you need to recover from training to get the desired adaptation you're training for.

Recovery has shorter timelines and brings you back to a baseline, whereas adaptations have longer time periods and make you stronger than before.

So, in summary, the best way to think of acute recovery is the restoration of performance capacity.

Many aspects of this restoration can occur in four to six hours if nutrition, hydration, and relaxation are done properly.

So that's the minimum recovery duration for a two-day training strategy.

Acute recovery can be fully restored in 24 hours for most people after most training situations with these good habits.

For high intensity sessions or bigger TSS days, aim for at least 48 hours for full recovery.

If you're really going big or have chronic fatigue built up in the system, give yourself a block of five to seven days easy with a few rest days in there, and you should be good to go for another block of training.

That's it.

That's our show for today.

Thanks again to Jonathan for writing in and asking some really great questions on the total science of recovery for cycling.

The goal of this episode was to give you that information of what happens in the body for recovery so that you understand why the timelines of training sessions throughout the week need to occur.

Hopefully, I was able to do that for all of you to understand in a simple way.

This sets the stage for nearly a month of episodes coming up where we look at how timelines of adaptations to occur for things like increasing FTP or VO2 max and the role of recovery plays throughout.

Be sure to come back each week for those and don't forget to share it with a friend or a training partner.

Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you back here again next week.

Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast.

We hope you enjoyed the show.

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