You’re training hard. You’re eating right. You’re pushing yourself day in, day out. And you’re getting nowhere.
When it comes to exercise and physical fitness, it is entirely possible to sabotage your own best efforts by going all in. If you feel that you’re heading downhill fast – frequently tired or ill, struggling to concentrate, seeing no progress in your weight, strength, endurance or other important measures of performance – you may be suffering from under-recovery.
It might not be as frequently discussed as other fitness-related risks like injury, but under-recovery is a common problem – especially among high-achievers who strive unrelentingly for success in other areas of their lives. “We see it to varying degrees in all our clients,” says Harry Fisher, Wellness Director of health and fitness consultancy OmniAthlete. “These are individuals who are typically highly driven and push the limits in their professional lives, in their fitness goals and in their social life.”
The good news is that under-recovery is treatable and preventable, and avoiding it doesn’t have to mean sitting still. We spoke with Fisher to get to the bottom of this troublesome phenomenon and learn how to stop under-recovery in its tracks, while still advancing towards your fitness goals.
Harry Fisher: To understand under-recovery it is first necessary to understand stress. Stress can make us or break us.
We will all be familiar with stress in the conventional sense of feeling overwhelmed, having relationship issues or experiencing problems at work. But stress can hit us from many more angles than most people realise. Did you ever stop to think that the latest trending fasting diet is a stress on the body? Or that exercising at high intensity over and over again is another stress? Or the mercury in the fish you eat? Or the circadian disruption of international travel? Or the long periods every day spent seated at your desk?
Our ability to adapt to the relentless stresses of 21st-century life is governed by our recovery. Effective recovery means that we can successfully adapt to the myriad stressors of modern life allowing us to sustain a high level of wellbeing and performance. In this scenario, the stress of, say, intensive exercise or intermittent fasting, can be seen as ‘good’ stress that stimulates us to adapt and become fitter, healthier and leaner. But this is a constant balancing act, and when the balance is tipped too far towards the stressors rather than recovery, we are at risk of under-recovery, with stressors overwhelming the body’s ability to return to homeostasis.
What has really struck us is that, without exception, every client who we have worked with at OmniAthlete was experiencing a degree of under-recovery at the outset. It is only through fundamentally rethinking lifestyle factors such as how they exercise, when and how they eat, sleep optimisation, light exposure, breath work and deep relaxation techniques that we have been able to restore their equilibrium.
Harry Fisher: There's absolutely a link, and we might think of chronic under-recovery as paving the way to burnout. At OmniAthlete, our goal is to intercept people much earlier in this process, ideally before any physical or mental signs and symptoms of burnout develop. Indeed, some of our clients have had prior damaging experiences of burnout and work with us to ensure they are able to perform in high-pressure roles once again, but in a more sustainable way that is compatible with a high level of wellbeing, or what we refer to as ‘healthy high performance’.
This is where monitoring daily bio-metrics such as HRV and running regular in-depth blood work are real game-changers. We’re not waiting for someone to get sick, injured, anxious, depressed or at a crisis point before we intervene. We’re constantly working to stay ahead of the curve and optimise our clients so that they can thrive and perform at their peak.
Harry Fisher: From our experience, the best strategy is to track objective measures of recovery status over time and be responsive to them. We utilise a combination of biometric data, wellness questionnaires via our OMNIathlete Today app, performance markers and advanced nutritional and bio-medical blood testing to establish whether someone is optimally recovered or starting to move towards a state of under-recovery. This enables us to shift the paradigm to be proactive and preventive, not constantly reactive.
But ultimately it is about respecting the three pillars of wellness that underpin our whole approach: fuel, move and recharge.
When it comes to fuelling, eating the right foods in the right amounts at the right times, and taking the right supplements, is absolutely foundational to supporting recovery. Individualising this according to in-depth nutritional and bio-medical blood testing allows for a precision approach that takes out a lot of the guesswork and confusion regarding what to eat and what supplements to take.
When it comes to movement, knowing when to push hard and when to back off is keyl. Having a detailed insight into recovery status means that we can identify the right time to push physical load higher in order to achieve a successful adaptation, thus over time improving fitness and body composition. Conversely, we may lessen training ‘stress’ during periods where the cognitive load is higher, such as in the run-up to major work deadlines, or when starting a new job role.
When it comes to recharging, this is the pillar that virtually every client we have worked with has grossly under-appreciated. There really is no substitute for sufficient, restorative sleep, yet very few people actively create the optimal conditions that make this possible. In fact many of our lifestyle habits such as evening caffeine consumption, eating large meals late at night, alcohol consumption and screen use close to bedtime sabotage restorative sleep. Likewise, many people diligently prioritise PT sessions in their schedule whilst completely neglecting down-regulating and restorative activities such as meditation or a breath work practice. The need to place equal priority on effective recharge strategies is a critical realisation.
Once these three pillars are in place, we find that people can massively improve their ability to handle both physical and mental load over time, enabling them to push hard in all the areas they desire, whilst averting all the problems that come with chronic under-recovery.
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