Yeah, IDK. Agree that natural sounds better than unnatural, but if it’s the inflammation that’s causing adaptation, seems anything natural or unnatural that suppresses it might reduce the adaption. Perhaps recovery and adaptation are somewhat different in that it might be best to speed recovery when a big effort is coming up the next day, even if that may inhibit adaptation to some degree.
We’ll start with that which I got from a quick googling “can speeding recovery hinder adaptation in endurance athletes” which after reading the abstract seems to point to benefits of active recovery. Also figure cool downs and cool down rides are still rides and still have their place as part of specificity. Just because it doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
I think there’s a decent consensus around making sure you’re recovering in such a way that allows you to do more work than trying to squeeze every bit of “adaptation” possible out of every workout. Let’s say you do a hard sub-threshold workout and it takes a heavy toll out of you. With what you’re implying as to not do anything to aid recovery a day or two later you might not be ready for your next workout because you’re still feeling heavy fatigue both mentally and physically. Where as if you did things to improve recovery like easy spins, sports massage or foam rolling for fascia release and eating healthy (yes, eating anti-oxidants are said blunt training effect but the health benefits far outweigh what little detriment there might be) you could be recovered to the point of being able to successfully complete another hard workout the following day or the next. And while you might devil’s advocate why NSAIDs would help aid recovery they work a little too well at reducing inflammation of all kinds. As many on this forum have trumpeted repeatedly volume is often key to best performance increase and by extension adaptation. So in short, if utilizing natural recovery methods allow for greater volume and quality of training load then that would outweigh any potential adaptations left on the table or lost by recovering “too quickly.”
I want to add in addition to avoiding NSAIDs that Stacy Sims (and maybe Bob Seebohar, I think he mentioned it in his book) says keeping vitamin/supplement intake away from workouts by around 5 hours as that can blunt training effect. Recommendation was if workout is in the morning, take them with dinner. If in the afternoon, take them with breakfast.
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Very interesting and good points, though that article seems to be testing a 4 minute recovery between successive very hard intervals (sprints) within a workout which I think is a bit different from recovery after a workout when the next hard effort is a day or more away. It seems to me many of these discussions focus on speeding recovery so that lack of recovery doesn’t hinder being able to hit workout targets or perform maximally in a race. I see that as being a different question than what schedule of workouts and recovery would lead to maximal adaptation. I see cooldowns as certainly being relevant to the former, but not necessarily the latter. It seem training plans, in general, leave a lot of room for recovery.
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