Advanced Balancing

The right mix of training and recovery is essential to peak performance

By Pete Pfitzinger, M.S.
As featured in the April 2009 issue of Running Times Magazine

Every time you do a hard workout, you provide a stimulus for your body to improve in some way, such as your lactate threshold, fat-burning ability, VO2 max, and so on. Any one workout, though, provides only a mild stimulus for improvement; it's the sum of your workouts over time that determines the total stimulus to improve a specific component of your fitness. For example, if you do one tempo run in the few months before a marathon, you provide a mild stimulus for your lactate threshold to improve. If you do six tempo runs in eight weeks, you provide a strong repetitive stimulus for your lactate threshold to improve.

The training stimulus, however, is only half of the formula for performance improvement. To improve, your body must recover from training and adapt to a higher level. By learning to manage your recovery, you'll optimize your training. If you manage your recovery so that you can do hard workouts more frequently or so that the quality of your hard workouts consistently improves, then you'll provide a greater stimulus for your body to improve its capacities.