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Recovery And Regeneration In Sport

The Champions League is back, and it is bigger than ever. The competition format has been expanded to accommodate four additional teams, with the total number of games being played this year increasing from 125 to 189.

Rather than playing six matches to reach the knockout stage, each team is now required to play eight, adding more fixtures to a schedule already considered by many to be over-congested. Coaches, managers and, especially, players have long protested about the higher levels of fatigue these extra games create, and the impact that they have on performance levels and player welfare.

But with a seemingly insatiable consumer demand for more and more games every year, this is a situation that shows no signs of being resolved soon. Congested schedules are not the sole preserve of soccer, with many sports experiencing an ever-expanding number of competitions.

So, what can sports teams do to mitigate these increased demands?

With ever more events being added to the sporting calendar, the need for rapid and effective recovery has never been more pronounced. Here we look at the role that athlete recovery and regeneration plays in high performance sport.

The Need for Recovery and Regeneration in Sport

Modern day sport has seen an increase in physical demands, performance expectations, and particularly, competition frequency. Athletes are being required to perform at higher standards more often, and with games or sporting events sometimes occurring every three days, this can easily lead to an imbalance between fatigue and recovery. In many sports, the opportunities that athletes have available to recover are often limited due to high training demands, congested fixture schedules, and the associated increased travel requirements which accompany them. This results in athletes being exposed to large amounts of physical and psychological stress which, if not addressed and managed correctly, can result in them becoming excessively fatigued.

Incomplete recovery can result in underperformance and injury, therefore effective recovery strategies are required to alleviate athlete fatigue, to regain performance levels, to promote adaptation and to reduce the risk of injury or burnout.

Essentially, those athletes who recover faster are likely to be able to train with greater quality, to maximize their preparation, and consequently, to maintain higher performance levels for longer.

The Role of Recovery and Regeneration

Recovery and Regeneration are effectively two components of a process which might be better described as Performance Restoration. The role that both recovery and regeneration play in athlete performance can be observed from two perspectives: Competition and Training. Let us firstly look at those recovery factors associated with competition.

Competition

Increased frequency of competition often requires athletes to participate with only two or three days recovery between events. For performance to be maximized, a balance between physical & mental stress and recovery needs to be achieved, and it is difficult to maintain optimal athlete readiness when they are exposed to less than 72 hours of recovery time before the next event on the calendar.

For that reason, employing effective recovery methods which accelerate the return of the athlete to a level of physiological and psychological readiness, particularly during periods of intensified competition, are essential. Several recovery activities, when used correctly, have been shown to assist with the removal of sport induced fatigue through mechanisms which include the reduction of inflammation, limiting muscle damage, promoting muscle regeneration, and replenishing energy stores.

This issue concerning the need for rapid athlete recovery during congested competitive schedules can be put into context by considering this six-week schedule for a soccer team in the English Premier League:

Fixture List

Here we have the fixture list for a Premier League soccer team over a six-week period. This illustrates the issue of congested game schedules, and of the high competition loads and the fatigue after-effects which are likely to occur as a result.

Over a 45-day period the team was required to play in 12 fixtures.
6 of these fixtures were away from home, exacerbating the fatigue after-effects associated with game load due to an intense travel schedule.
During this phase, there were five occasions where the team had only 2 days of recovery and preparation time before the subsequent game (highlighted in red).
One of the fixtures was a Champions League game which involved international travel, which leads to the further complications of air travel and time zone change. Travel can have a disruptive effect on sleep schedules and on meal timings, thereby compromising two important components of the recovery process. In addition to this, aircraft are a bad environment for recovery due to issues associated with dry air and increased cabin pressure.
One of the fixtures (22 Dec) was a cup competition involving extra time and penalties, during which additional game load was accumulated. Extra time has been shown to result in higher levels of creatine kinase compared to normal 90-minute games, indicating that these players would likely be subjected to greatly increased levels of muscle damage.

Competition timetables of this sort are not restricted to soccer, which demonstrates the enormous levels of physiological and psychological stress that athletes undergo. Schedules such as this highlight the importance of employing effective restorative strategies which will assist with the removal of fatigue, promote muscle regeneration, replenish energy stores and accelerate the return of the athlete to a level of performance readiness.

Collectively, these strategies represent the Recovery component of performance restoration.

The second function of recovery & regeneration in sport is related to training.

Training:

Successfully improving an athlete’s fitness through training requires load to be sequenced appropriately, alternating between intensified stimulus/fitness acquisition days, and lower adaptation/supercompensation days. Training induced adaptation occurs primarily during the low activity periods between intense exercise, which means that the athlete needs a sufficient amount of recovery time to allow this adaptation to take place.

However, with training time being at a premium, coaches frequently demand that athletes train repeatedly at high intensities, because this is consistent with the level of performance which is necessary for competition. Under these conditions, recovery activities which can manipulate the timeframes of recovery and improve acute regeneration are required between training sessions. These activities are designed to minimize the impact of training induced fatigue, resulting in faster recovery and therefore in a maintenance of higher performance levels during subsequent training sessions.

The second (and more important) function of training specific restoration is to augment the athlete’s adaptive response, or, in other words, to magnify the outcomes of the training stimulus. Let’s take endurance training as an example.

One of the adaptation goals of endurance training is to increase mitochondrial density and function. The mitochondria play a crucial role in supplying energy to the working muscles; therefore, a greater mitochondrial density will enable athletes to compete at higher intensities for longer. Ice baths are one of the most common recovery protocols used by athletes, and cold-water immersion following endurance exercise has been shown to enhance mitochondrial adaptations, amplifying the training effect and, consequently, improving endurance performance. In this example, cold water immersion will augment the training stimulus, meaning that the aims and objectives of the training program can be achieved more quickly. This represents the Regeneration component of performance restoration.

Clearly, regeneration modalities can become a crucial component of the training process and are important factors both in reducing the athlete’s experience of fatigue and for inducing performance adaptation. However, there are occasions when recovery interventions can in fact be detrimental to long term athlete development, in what could be regarded as being a recovery ‘paradox’.

The Recovery ‘Paradox’

Intensified training creates muscle damage, specific metabolic responses, increased inflammation and high levels of muscular fatigue. These are considered to be important drivers of training induced adaptations and, consequently, improved performance levels. Although recovery interventions between sessions will minimize the impact of fatigue, these interventions may result in a blunting of the adaptation response.

In other words, inflammation is an important signaling mechanism in the adaptive process, and the chronic use of short-term recovery strategies may in fact compromise certain performance adaptations. Because of this, the suppression of the inflammatory pathways might actually be unfavorable to the overall training and adaptation process.

Let us continue with our cold-water immersion example from before, only this time apply it to strength training rather than endurance training. The Nordic curl is an exercise which is used within strength training programs to specifically increase the eccentric strength of the hamstrings, with the goal of reducing the potential risk of the athlete suffering a hamstring strain. If the athlete enters an ice-bath immediately after performing the Nordic curl, the inflammatory response to the exercise may become blunted, which would mean that the training adaptation could be lower than was intended. In other words, the hamstring muscle would not be gaining the full beneficial effects of the strength exercise. For that reason, recovery modalities that blunt the inflammatory response can, under certain circumstances, be considered detrimental to the long-term development of the athlete.

This example of cold-water immersion demonstrates the level of specificity which is attached to various recovery modalities. There are some recovery activities which should be promoted at certain times but avoided at others, based on the aims and objectives of the training program and the timeframes available throughout the competition schedule.

For this reason, an understanding of the role that recovery and regeneration plays at different stages of the competitive season is of critical importance if performance practitioners are to make informed decisions as to which modalities should be used, when they should be used, and how they should be used.

Applied Recovery and Regeneration in Sport

For recovery to be successful, practitioners have to be able to accurately assess athlete fatigue, and they have to monitor the fatigue-recovery profiles of their athletes using identified and valid markers. From this recovery assessment, practitioners can then select and apply the most appropriate recovery interventions with their athletes.

The importance of monitoring fatigue and benchmarking athlete recovery means that the performance restoration process has to be supported by data, and this requires a high-performance data management platform.

An effective data management system will facilitate communication with multiple different athlete tracking technologies, which then enables all data relevant to fatigue and recovery to be analyzed. This ensures that an integrated approach to performance restoration is adopted, and that the risks associated with athlete under-recovery are minimized as much as possible.

Where Apollo Makes a Real Difference

Apollo’s athlete performance software unlocks data silos allowing coaches, trainers, doctors and players to become masters of data-driven performance with real-time data visualization and collaboration tools. Our software is integrated with over 80 performance focused technologies used by college and professional athletes. With Apollo, teams have the information they need to minimize fatigue and optimize athlete recovery.

To learn more about using Apollo, visit www.apollov2.com or email info@apollov2.com.

Written by Adrian Lamb, ApolloV2 Sports Scientist

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WHAT APOLLO CAN DO FOR YOU

ApolloV2 is not a traditional ‘one size fits all’ athlete management system. Instead, we are a highly adaptable platform which can create customized dashboards specifically tailored to each team’s individual needs and unique way of working.

Our system equips teams with the ability to generate custom-made data visualizations without software code. We have more API’s than any other system, which allows us to collect data from the multiple tools and systems staff are using, and then combine it efficiently to allow coaches to make informed decisions with their players.

We have Power Bi and Tableau integrated into our ecosystem, which enables us to build bespoke, best-in-class data reports designed to meet specific requirements and ensure that coaches receive the data driven insights they need, to inform decision making and influence positive change.

To learn more about using ApolloV2 for performance enhancement, email – alamb@apollov2.com.