Building Dots: How to Recover from (for) the Circus
If you’re like me, you like training and you’re probably crappy at recovery.
Let me explain. Training is fun. You get to go to circus classes, lift big weights, swim, run, flip and all that groovy stuff. Then…… you have to recover well enough to be able to rebuild progress a little bit more than you did the night before. If you don’t, well, you get a lil’ messed up.
Catch the formula? Train. Recover. Train. Recover. Rinse. Repeat.
In my case, I’m recovering for performance improvement, mental health, and for continued health over long periods of time. So let’s put a little bit of a skeleton around what I will call non-negotiable essentials and then we can layer in the fancy athlete stuff for circuitry.
Now the goal of recovery should -
“.. aim to re-establish psychological, physiological, emotion, social and behavioral components contributing to elite performance back to baseline….. We believe the bedrock of any restoration programme should center around nutrition, sleep, and emotional and mental relaxation ….. (pp. 365, HPTFS).”
But the puddin’ is in the execution. Today will be about sleep and nutrition. Next week we’ll get into mental relaxation and more fancy stuff. Recovery is a whole profession and sub-world within sport; with fancy discussions around heat exposure, cold exposure, and all that other sexy stuff. Though I want to, we’re going to avoid all of that and focus on the basics. Sleep first, darling.
Sleep
Sleep is the most foundational of recovery practices and is widely consider the best means available for athletes to recover (pp. 348, High Performance Training for Sports). Personally, I struggle with sleep – or have historically – due to the nature of pain and the insidious lack of recovery that comes along with that.
That said, it’s no secret that humans need at least 8 hours of sleep to function optimally. I am lucky to have control over my sleep and wake times as I my schedule is self-constructed. Thus (which you should read with a pretentious academic accent), the plan will be for my life. If train more I need to sleep more than my baseline. A human baseline for sleep is to –
Sleep at least 8 hours at night, with a sleep opportunity window of at least 9 hours per night. If you train more, you gots to sleep more.
All fundamental practices feed into trying to establish this baseline behavior. What’s nice about this is that though there are hundreds complex, technological tools available to us, sleep comes down to basic routine, avoiding stimulants, and not looking at your phone for half an hour (an hour if you’re hardcore) before you end up going to bed. I’ve found that overplanning lends to nervousness, which quickly tends towards a lack of sleep. So instead, let’s focus on some very basic practices and do ‘em well.
How to do the zzz’s
Following the recommendations for quality sleep, high performance training for sports and the practical recommendations of sleep researcher Matthew Walker, foundational sleep practices should be comprised of -
Have a regular bedtime and wake-up time.
Maintain a proper sleep environment: dark, quiet, cool room that has good air, comfortable mattress, pillows, sheets, and clothing. I sleep Au naturel as I think this could be the worst possible case for an intruder.
Avoid caffeine or alcohol late afternoon. Personally, I like to cut off my caffeine at 12 PM and decaf at 2 PM. My body can do 3 cups but no more. Ironically, this does also make the argument that if you’re going to drink, do it in the (vacation time) morning.
Apply a relaxation breathing technique / meditative practice. Currently I have a morning practice, which I’ll get into in a moment, but bookending the day with these practices might not be a bad idea. I use the waking up app currently.
Naps are ok if they are between 20-60 minutes and don’t compromise sleep patterns.
Now, that’s a baseline. Bed at same time, up at same time. Good sleep hygiene. No late caffeine. Meditate. And, importantly overlooked, no electronics in your bedroom. The goddess of performance (aka the muse) demands that athletes take good care of themselves and make at least small sacrifices to be in her presence.
General principles of what to eat and how much
Sports nutrition planning should be based around total, type, and timing (HPFS, pp. 98). Though covered most of this here, you eat to fuel, maintain, recover well, and stay alive (ideally sexy). Since we covered total and type, we’re going focus on timing and layer in supplementation. The basic approach is to eat the four pillars of nutrition as defined by Catherine Shanahan. Aim for 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, eat at last 800 grams of fruits and vegetables per day, aim for 30 different fruits and veggies per week, eat mostly low glycemic carbs but include high glycemic if your carbs depending on the amount of training you do in a given day (more carbs for long-durations or multiple sessions), and make sure you avoid vegetable oils plus things you’re allergic too. Put visually -
Timing: When to munch
So we’ve got all of these inputs, aka food. You got bone broth, fruits, veggies, organ meats, meat, fermented stuff, and all of these varying forms of carbohydrates that range somewhere between low glycemic to high glycemic. This leaves us with an obvious question of: when do I eat this stuff? And what do I eat? Our aim to to fuel performer, maximize the training itself, and then to recover from it.
Daily Protein Intake
We’ve established that we need about 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight to fuel muscle mass growth, preservation, and generally to function well. For me that’ll be 185g to 200 grams depending on how deep I am into my cut. Functionally, that’s a lot of protein. At 3 meals a day that’s 65+ grams of protein per meal. Beyond that, we have to consider what is called Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS).
The idea is that we alternate between a state of protein synthesis and muscle breakdown. The key there is avoid the breakdown as much as possible. Aka, stay out the of the grey zone of the graph above. This suggests that instead of having massive meals, we want to evenly (ish) distribute our protein intake throughout the day. This means we should aim to have that 190 grams become 38 gram little protein bombs as we go. So every 3-4 hours I will eat about 40 grams of protein. Three meals and two snacks with about 40 grams of protein (including training, but we’ll get to that) in each. If this sounds like heaven to you, it ain’t. It’s just showbiz.
Pre-Training intake is all about carbs
Training has generally three feels to it. Easy, medium, and “oh my god I think I died a little inside”. Then there is frequency of training per day. When we are operating within the easy realm, we eat low glycemic index foods and don’t worry about it too much. Things change when you go long or you hard
“Carbohydrates are the primary source of fuel during high-intensity and prolonged exercise (HPTFS, pp. 89).”
Prior to training, generally we should eat LGI carbohydrates as the source of daily fuel. These are things like vegetables, sweet potatoes, and other things that aren’t generally all that sweet. But now we gotta think about during training and after! We know that long exercise and hard exercise (not the same) both require fueling.
“Ingesting 30 to 60 grams of glucose per hour is widely recommended for events that last longer than 60 minutes (13). (HPTFS, pp. 92, Jeukendrup, 04)”
Translation: you got too drink sugary stuff if you’re training a long time, but no longer than 60g per hour you animal (HPTFS, pp. 92) Otherwise, you probably don’t need to. But what about after? (Golum voice) Can we have the precious sugar afters?
Post-training fuel: carbs and protein
Carbs first. Refueling our glycogen stores is key after intense exercise or training. We should think about the duration of the training and then the subsequent amount of carbohydrates we need to take in. Remember, short duration or easy probably doesn’t deplete our glycogen stores. But long and hard does. Translated (HPTFS, pp. 92) -
Short Events: For shorter, less intense activity, adjust carbohydrate intake down. For example, if you just did Crossfit’s Randy workout, maybe take in 10 grams of sugar and recognize that you only did a 5 minute workout.
Intense, Long-Duration Events: For events like a full day of high intensity aerial training camp where glycogen depletion is significant:
Initial Refueling (4 hours): Consume 1.2 grams of high glycemic index (HGI) carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight per hour. So 4 x 90 grams every hour.
Continued Refueling (18 hours): Switch to medium or low glycemic index (GI) carbohydrates. Aim for 8-12 grams per kilogram of body weight per day (or more in some cases) to optimize glycogen resynthesis.
For me, if I’m doing some crazy training, I would have a big sugary drink, say a Gatorade because branding, every four hours, four times. For a normal training session (60 min duration moderate intensity) I probably won’t need to refuel much. If it felt like I was dying and it was intense, I’ll aim to refuel with 30 grams of HGI carbohydrates. So, if more than moderate at 60 minutes, 30 grams. Otherwise tough it out buttercup.
Post pump protein. Sorry, had to get a little bro-ie on your for a second. Back to science! Bro-science dictates that we have an anabolic window after training, which is partially true, but it’s not the key variable in muscle growth. Put differently, you may have extra time to refuel with protein even if it’s past the proverbial 30 minute window. That said, immediate protein does also help with muscle glycogen replenishment post exercise (HPTS, pp. 94). So it will be beneficial post training session to ingest protein. Pragmatically -
“Due to convenience, a popular postexercise protein source is whey protein (processed from cows' milk, which is 20 per cent whey and 80 per cent casein). Whey protein is considered the gold standard of post workout intake due to ease of digestion, the speed at which whey increases blood amino acid concentrations and its high leucine content (28). (HPTFS, pp. 94)”
In other words, one scoop of this’ll do it for me.
Sooooo…. assuming a normal training session of low to medium intensity of under 60 minutes - one scoop of protein. If above medium or above, one scoop of protein and 30 grams of something high glycemic and tasty. Anything beyond that, see the Intense, Long-Duration Events.
Closing thoughts
I think that doing these two foundational practices really well will be key for performance in the circus and, perhaps, living a long and happy life. This sort of article can get complicated, overwhelming, and, in turn, a heck of a lot less actionable otherwise. Given the massive role that these two things play in recovery, it’s good to start here and then build upon our conceptual models on top of them. In the future, I’ll get a little fancier and talk about cold exposure, saunas (which are more fun if you acted out musicals), self-massage work, meditation, and the like. But for now, the basics ….. grasshopper. I think these principles also apply to you if you’re not a performer but that’s the way I’m choosing to live my life. So thank you for reading through this article. I hope it was useful for you. If so, send me a steak or something.
I eat a lot.
