Performance and recovery
Perform better. Recover smarter.
Training is one input. What you do in the twenty-two hours you are not training decides how much of it you actually keep. This is for athletes, for people who used to be athletes, and for anyone who would simply like to stop feeling wrecked by Thursday.
Almost nobody is under-training
Ask a room of committed people what is holding their performance back and most will say they need to train harder. Ask what their sleep has been like and the room goes quiet.
Adaptation does not happen during the session. The session is the stimulus. The adaptation happens afterwards, and it needs sleep, fuel, fluid and enough time between hard efforts to actually occur. Load without recovery is not training, it is just accumulating fatigue and calling it discipline.
The same logic applies whether you are chasing a personal best or just trying to get through a working week with something left in the tank.
Six inputs, and only one of them is training
Fix the ones nobody photographs and the training starts working better.
Sleep
The single most effective recovery intervention available and the only one that is free. Sleep restriction shows measurable effects on reaction time, endurance and perceived effort in controlled studies.
Hydration
Fluid loss affects endurance and how hard a given effort feels, and the effect appears at lower losses than most people expect. This is well studied and rarely acted on.
Fuelling
Total intake and timing around sessions, before anything more exotic. Chronic under-fuelling is common, particularly in endurance sport, and it undoes training rather than sharpening it.
Cardiovascular fitness
VO2 max is the headline measure of aerobic capacity. It is trainable, it is one of the better predictors of long-term health outcomes, and it is widely misused in marketing. More on that below.
Strength
Protective against injury, increasingly important from the forties onward, and the thing endurance athletes drop first when time gets tight. Usually a mistake.
Load management
How hard, how often, and how much easy work sits between the hard days. Most avoidable injuries trace back to this rather than to any single session.
Understand the science
01. What VO2 max actually is
02. Why VO2 max gets attached to things that have nothing to do with it
03. Where the recovery industry outruns its evidence
What you can explore from here
Four routes, depending on what you are chasing.
Hydration for performance
What the sports science actually measured, and where the claims made for water go past it.
Supplement quality
Sports supplements are a minefield of contamination risk and unsupported claims. How to ask better questions.
Training into your fifties
What changes, what does not, and why strength stops being optional somewhere around here.
Fitness and the brain
The link between aerobic fitness and how well people think, and what it is reasonable to conclude from it.
How we handle this subject
Athletes are a soft target. They are motivated, they are looking for an edge, and they will try almost anything that might give them one. That combination has produced an entire industry of confident claims with very little behind them.
So we will not attach a performance number to a product without product-specific human evidence for that exact claim. We will say when something makes you feel better without evidence that it recovers you better, because those are different things. And if you compete under anti-doping rules, we will always point you at batch-tested products and your own governing body rather than at us.
Read the Medistic StandardWork out which input is actually limiting you
It is usually not the one you are focused on. Your Medistic Health consultant can talk through where the gap sits and what would be worth changing first. If the honest answer is sleep and an earlier dinner, that is what you will hear.
Speak with your consultantMedistic Health publishes education about everyday wellbeing. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing we publish is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Speak to a qualified healthcare professional before starting or significantly changing a training programme. Competing athletes should check any supplement against their own anti-doping rules.
