The Ups and Downs of Training: Understanding Recovery, Supercompensation, and Smart Programming
“What goes up must come down." In the context of athletic training, this refers to the ebb and flow of physical performance and recovery. When training intensely, whether in the gym or in any sport, there's only so much you can push your body before it needs a break. This necessary downtime is what allows your muscles, nervous system, and overall fitness to recover, repair, and eventually improve. To maximize progress, it’s important to understand the balance between pushing hard and giving your body the rest it needs. We ensure this through our programming.
Training Phases: How to Avoid Plateaus and Optimize Gains
Most structured training programs work in phases, typically lasting around 4 to 6 weeks, with adjustments to training variables along the way. These variables could include:
Progressive overload: Increasing the number of reps, sets, or weights
Movement complexity: Adding new exercises or increasing movement difficulty
Volume adjustments: Changing the total amount of work done in a session or across the week
Why change these variables? Because if you were to do the same workout, with the same intensity, and the same number of sets and reps week after week, your body would eventually adapt, leading to a plateau. At that point, your progress stalls, and your body simply maintains its current fitness level. This strategy of changing variables through a training week is called progressive overload.
Supercompensation
Supercompensation is the body's natural ability to recover from intense training and, in doing so, improve its performance capacity beyond its previous baseline. It’s the reason why we can continually get stronger, faster, or more resilient with consistent training and goes hand in hand with progressive overload. Here’s how it works:
Base Level of Fitness: When you start a new training phase, you have a base level of fitness, representing your current strength, endurance, or skill.
Training Stress: As you introduce new workouts, you create a temporary performance dip. Your muscles get fatigued, glycogen stores are depleted, and you may feel sore or tired. This stress pushes your body into a state of fatigue, signaling the need for recovery.
Recovery Mode: After training, your body begins the recovery process. This phase is critical. Without proper recovery through nutrition and sleep the body won't repair itself fully, and you won’t reap the rewards of your hard work.
Supercompensation: Once your body has fully recovered, it enters the supercompensation phase. Your body doesn’t just return to its original state but becomes stronger, more efficient, and better prepared for the next workout. Whether it's improved strength, enhanced muscular endurance, or better cardiovascular efficiency, supercompensation is the reason your fitness improves over time.
It’s important to note that progress is not a continuous upward trajectory. The process of supercompensation involves ups and downs. You will experience periods of fatigue and recovery, but as long as you're balancing intensity with recovery, you’ll notice that your overall performance gradually improves. Consistency is key: over time, this cycle of stress and recovery will lead to sustained progress and prevent plateaus.
How Our Programming Supports Supercompensation
Now that we understand the importance of recovery and adaptation, let’s look at how a typical training program incorporates these principles to ensure optimal performance gains. Training programs often follow a structure that alternates between phases of high-intensity work and periods of lighter activity or rest. This is known as periodization and helps prevent overtraining while allowing the body to fully recover and improve.
Microcycles and Deload Weeks
One of the most common ways to structure a training phase is through microcycles—shorter, one-week segments that make up a larger 4-week training phase. In each microcycle, there will be fluctuations in intensity to allow for adaptation without overloading the body.
For example, let’s take a look at how our program structures a week within the 4-6 week phase:
Mid-Week Deload: In our programming, we incorporate a mid-week "deload" session, typically on Wednesdays. Deloads are designed to provide active recovery without overtaxing the body. This ensures that you’re not pushing your body to its limits day after day. The purpose of the deload session is to maintain movement and keep your muscles active, but at a lower intensity that promotes recovery rather than adding more stress.
On deload days, you might focus on lower-intensity exercises such as mobility work, light cardio, or stretching, allowing the body to rest while staying active. This helps to facilitate recovery by improving circulation, aiding muscle repair, and flushing out metabolic waste from intense training days.
Deload days act as essential recovery tools. They prevent the body from becoming overstressed while ensuring continuous progress by giving the body the rest it needs to repair and improve effectively.