How to Build High Performance Recovery Sessions (HPRT): Breathing and Mobilizations

I don’t play favorites. 

Except when it comes to recovery methods! 

We all know what it feels like the morning after a truly exhausting training session or competition: Super Garbage. Yes, that’s an actual term I use when checking in with athletes. That next day feeling can leave you feeling like it’s hard to just walk from the couch to the kitchen. In fact, it may take most of the day or longer to feel somewhat normal. 

As hard as it is, the best thing to do is go through some kind of warm-up via light movement and stretching. After this most people tend to feel much better and then can get through the rest of their day without an issue. Do they feel great? No. But can they “make it”? Yes. Okay, that’s not too bad.

But what if it were possible to tweak that time-tested formula and leave the session feeling loose, recovered, and ready to - dare I say it? - PERFORM again?!?!

It is possible.

My current favorite recovery method is called high performance recovery training. I got this directly from Joel Jamieson (coaches and trainers, check out his 8-weeks out certification), it involves taking an athlete in need of recovery and relaxing them, doing mobilizations, getting \ blood flow going via aerobic work, and finishing with an explosive movement or two. Magic.

What I like about keeping with the style Jamieson uses is that even with a typical recovery type session of stretching, athletes may feel better, but they are still not ready to do anything explosive. Or, you know, athletic. It’s like the recovery process isn't really complete so they would not be ready to go in and have a high quality practice. So adding in the explosive component at the end really gets them back as close to normal as we can. 

Some players that are seeing me individually will get a full session like this while the rest of the team comes in. Sometimes we are really pressed for time so we will do an abbreviated version. Either way the whole idea is to switch from that stressed out sympathetic state into a more relaxed and ready parasympathetic state where they focus on what’s going on in the moment. 

Really what that entails is giving them a whole bunch of mobilizations to try to attack the whole body. Generally we start with the feet, which is important for basketball players because of how restrictive the shoes are. Then we'll work on the ankle. Moving up the chain from there into the hips, t-spine, and shoulders. One or two mobilizations each area typically does the trick.

At this point we’ve relaxed into the parasympathetic state, and we have now mobilized the entire body. Then we'll go into some LIGHT blood flow work, which would be some type of aerobic activity. I'll generally break it up into five minute chunks, just to keep it from being too monotonous. We typically would do 2-4 round of 5 minute chunks, so we may get anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes of light aerobic activity. One important thing to note is that we typically stick to non-impact activities with these such as VersaClimber, bike, carries, and light throws. Remember these sessions are typically for when the players are fatigued or banged up, so less impact on their joints is a must. After the blood flow work the next series will typically be some kind of unilateral work and a carry. So for example we would do a sled push and a goblet carry. We use the sled push because it can be a little bit of strength work and it is concentric only, so it will be easier on them to recover from. 

After this blood flow work we move into the explosive part of the session, which we will talk about in part two of this article.

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Program Design: College vs. Pro

One of the toughest things to do as a strength coach is balancing the in-season training loads of the athletes with your set of priorities; what you need to get done with your athletes including gaining performance, or just keeping them healthy. 

Understanding all of the competing demands the athletes you work with are under can be complicated, so I wanted to talk about how I’ve attempted balance them. When I’m working with college teams or private clients, I am always very systemized, I like to have a plan written out for them way ahead of time. For my college teams, I eventually got in the habit of writing out a full semester of workouts and progressions at the start of the semester. The trouble with that is things happen that are outside of your control. Missed training sessions or injuries, or something else unforeseen. 

I frequently ran into issues in the college sector where I would finish explaining a training session and there would be five athletes waiting to tell me they were hurt and needed to adjust the workout. This would happen for all of the eight or nine teams I worked with and added up to a lot of on-the-fly adjustments that I had to make.

Typically, the plans I write are very detailed, writing out the actual details of sets, reps, intensities, and exercise selection for the timeframe of the training wave or series of waves. At the college level they would typically be written for 3- to 4-week blocks. 

These blocks are really nice and clean, leading to progress that is precise and predictable. But, I have found that doesn't work everywhere. 

At the professional level the speed of communication is much faster. I no longer have to wait to hear a possible miscommunication about injuries from athletes or coaches. I hear directly from a medical professional, and I hear quickly. So I've needed to develop into someone who can be okay with planning workouts on a day-by-day basis if that's needed. With the amount of nicks and dings these athletes compete with, this seems to be the best approach. 

A rigid planner at heart, that was a tough pill to swallow, and unfortunately, I have not yet found a way that I can implement the planning process I used to use in its entirety. 

What it’s evolved to is setting my goals at the beginning of the season, and working with each athlete to determine what their top priorities are. After these goals and priorities are set, they are the framework that I follow to plan on a day-to-day basis. These goals are what drive the focus of what we do.  If the goal is better fitness and better conditioning, then that's what I’m focused on when I'm planning workouts. Whenever I consider adding something to the program the question I ask myself is always: “Is this something that comes directly back to supporting enhanced conditioning and enhanced fitness (or other set priority)?” 

If I was still in the college setting, I wouldn’t be able to work this way, it would just be too time consuming. However, I do like the individuality that it gives all of the athletes.

This new planning structure makes me still feel like we are working towards that one primary goal, even if I cannot plan nearly as far ahead. I do go back and review past weeks to make sure that when we do have the opportunity to repeat a lift, we are progressing in some way, whether that be volume or intensity, whatever is appropriate. 

I’m pleased with this approach, it makes me feel that I can move fast enough to meet the needs of the players. When I had a firm and structured plan, I was not able to do that and felt I was not adjusting quickly enough. 

So, take a look at the population you work with, and see what the best way is to plan for your athlete’s goals. This “best way” will give you room to make decisions on the fly without jeopardizing long term goals, effectively balancing the training demands of your athletes.

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Breathing Basics: Switching Sympathetic to Parasympathetic

Breathing drills have become an important foundation to each and everyone of my training sessions and it is something that, while complex on the surface, can be implemented in very simple ways that come with huge payoff.

If you want to get a primer in breathing drills, please check out my post from a few years back to get a foundational understanding of WHY they can be an important part of any training session: BREATHING DRILLS

In the past, I really only used one breathing drill per session, today it is up to a minimum of three. I like using a 3-drill circuit as the first thing the athlete does in their session for dual purpose of reaching the autonomic nervous system and targeting the respiratory muscles for warm-up purposes.

When using these drills in this way, paying attention to the way the athlete is breathing is very important. In this case the correct way would be to get as much air in as you can through your nose, hold it for a moment, and then exhale through the mouth. 

Perhaps this runner could benefit from a pre-session breathing circuit to help optimize airflow and prevent excessive exhaustion?

Outside of this there are body positions that are more optimal to do this in than others, however this may be more useful when we are trying to reset positions than anything else. In truth, it really does not matter the position in which you are breathing, the most important thing is that we are breathing deeply. 

The main goal of this type of breathing drill is to take us or our athletes from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state. This would mean switching your brain away from the daily stresses that all people deal with (from their boss, family, relationships, etc.) to focusing on the practice/training session in which they are about to engage. It helps the mind separate from the noise that doesn't help while you’re training, practicing, or competing. 

The other purpose that the breathing serves is to get the airflow to go through the body in a way that is extremely helpful for learning how to properly brace and support the spine. This is a safety enhancement, first and foremost, and a performance enhancement second. We want the body to be able to brace against and resist force, while we also want it to be able to produce force. Both of these are optimized with proper breathing. 

Bracing and resisting against forces protects us from injury, while producing force is what aids our performance. Breathing drills are the easiest way to start to teach an athlete’s body how to do those things. The key is making sure that the airflow is going deep down into your belly and expanding into your lower back and into the sides of your waist. 

With this style of breathing we are also activating all of the important muscles in the trunk that are involved in bracing. Activating these muscles help realign the bony structures in our body to aid in stability and bracing.  For example, many people tend to have an anterior pelvic tilt. If you think about your hips as a bucket of water, if you dip it forward, that would be an anterior pelvic tilt, and the water is now spilling out a little bit. Breathing drills help us pull those hips back into neutral and teach the muscles what that feels like to be neutral and braced in that position. Another good example of this would be rib position. 

Another common positional fault would be an overextended position in the ribs, which carries over to both injury risk and performance. This is another common postural fault that increases injury risk and can decrease performance just through an ineffective improper rib position. If someone is standing and they seem to be sticking their chest out, they are probably overextended. They're not just standing straight up, they're going beyond that. The telltale sign for this is we see the ribs sticking out. There are simple breathing drills that work to tuck those ribs back in and teach them where they should be. We need to get them to have a closer relationship with the diaphragm, which is extremely important from a positional standpoint. 

Nothing fancy here. Just deep breaths.

We went pretty into the weeds here but the most important thing to take away is if you come into the gym a little stressed out, just take some time and do a breathing drill. For example, eight deep breaths as a minimum. You can do those seated, close your eyes or don't close them, just make sure that air goes in through your nose and out through your mouth, traveling deep deep down into your belly. Doing this alone will really help you feel more calm and ready to get into your training session or whatever it is that you're trying to transition into.

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Conditioning for Team Sports: Buck the Tradition

The conditioning that I've started relying on focuses on the energy systems that I need my players to be able to work efficiently in. We are constantly pushing the body to recover as quickly and as efficiently as possible. That does not mean stopping and fully resting. It almost never means stopping for me anymore. The game of basketball never really stops, for free throws and foul shots yes, but not for very long. More often than not, they have to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, and then there's a burst. Soccer is very similar to this, that game does not stop, literally it does not stop.

So we have to be training for that, not training for the most extreme ridiculous thing that never happens in the game or the match. This means understanding when you use a five second work period, and when you use a 15 second work period. And when you could use what would be the extremes for these team sports, a 30 to 60 seconds work period. Use those minimally, that's extremely intense when you do those work periods. Even when using those extremely intense methods, the focus is always recovery, because that's what's going to really help you win.If the players can only be super fast once or twice, and then they can't recover, they're no good to you.

To train for this recovery, we have to be working in the correct heart rate zones. In the offseason, I'll run this type of conditioning and we will do very general recovery, generally called active recovery in between work periods. An example of this would be max effort broad jumps to work on explosive power and then to recover, it might be something like jump rope, battle ropes, or weighted carries. The active recovery is more general in nature during this time, but as we get closer to the season and into the season, the active recovery will become more specific. An example of this would be again using a broad jump and then using light layups for example for active recovery. Now, we're working in a place and working in a way where we're minimizing the impact, because we're being very smart about when we actually asked them to run. And we're being really smart about getting creative on things where running isn't required. If they're out there doing their sport, that's probably enough of the high volume running, that’s something we want to minimize as much as possible. I may keep short sprints on a treadmill or something during the season, but all of our active recovery is going to be through different methods. This could be slow step ups, where there isn’t much impact but that's still working the running muscles, right?

What we are really looking for with conditioning is how hard the heart is working, or beats per minute. So you can look strictly at that, but then you also can't forget about what the sport entails, specificity of that movement, and the current workload of the athlete. So if you look at what the athlete’s currently doing, and you think, okay, we're in season they’re getting a lot of sport specific training in, this should change the exercises used during conditioning. For example if they are fully in season let’s take away the joint pounding and do short sprints and a kettlebell carry to recover. This works because at this point we are only really looking at what the heart rate is doing. Now, if we're getting ready for a training camp or preseason time period, a time we're not heavily involved in practices, then we want to get more sports specific movements and sports specific muscle groups involved. So that same all out sprint, might then be paired with, you know, some more jogging, for example, to actually recover.

There's a lot you can do with this. It's just like anything else, get creative. There’s not one correct to do things. BUCK THE TRADITION. Forget all of the suck it up buttercup, if you cant finish it you’re weak and didn’t prepare conditioning sessions. You need to be looking at what the sport requires to be successful in it, and where your athletes actually are, where you actually are and bridge that gap between where they need to be and where they are right now.

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Conditioning for Team Sports: Conditioning & Energy Systems

The next thing is we need to discuss with conditioning is making it specific to the energy systems used during the athlete’s sport.  The energy systems that our body is using while we're sitting down and watching TV are very different than the energy system that it's using when we go for a light 30 minute jog, which are different than the energy system that we use when we are sprinting, which are different from what’s happening on the court during a game.

Basketball athletes typically push hard for 15, maybe even 30 seconds at a time. Then they get rest periods where they are still moving (often quickly) but NOT at max speed.This is similar to soccer, where you sprint for short bursts of five seconds, and then half the field jogs and walks. While the fast action goes on elsewhere on the field. And then they sprint again. And then they get a nice recovery period where they’re jogging or walking. Lacrosse is in that same boat, all of these sports use very similar energy systems.

Using giant traffic cones adds to the drama of any drill.

Now, one of the things that you can talk about is the energy system requirements of different positions in soccer in particular, where there are differences that should be accounted for. But let's just talk more generally right now. And say, if we can look at real heart rate data, or even just get a stopwatch out and time these sprint versus walking periods. I have never seen soccer players max effort sprint and change direction for 60 seconds over and over and over again. Nothing resembling the 300m shuttle test for example happens during these sports. It just doesn't happen. For more information on this idea please see our previous blog post on misconception about conditioning.

The closer test would be the one where you sprint then full field, jog to recover, and then do it again. That's a good midfielders test. We have to understand that, to be the best that we can be at the sport, we can't be going way outside the realm of what the sport actually requires. Now there is a cross training period that we can do in the offseason. But even then, you're not going to be going to these extremes and just asking the body to do these ridiculous things.

We have to look at what's happening in the game, which are these small bursts of dynamic movements. The athletes are all over the place, they're in different planes of motion, they're not running straight forward the entire time, they're changing direction like crazy.  We have to look at the work time period for these small bursts of dynamic movements and the active rest between them.

This is where the concept of active recovery comes into play. The next article in this series explain how this type of conditioning can be accomplished but for now, try to make the conditioning match up with what the sports asks of the athletes.

Since you’re here: We have a small favor to ask! At SAPT, we are committed to sharing quality information that is both entertaining and compelling to help build better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage us authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics.

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Feeding the Family: Fluid Intake Recommendations

Hydration is extremely important for humans and animals to stay alive and have all of our biological processes be executed as precisely and efficiently as they are capable of. So today’s post is going to be on some tips and guidelines for proper hydration year round.

First of all, we need to talk about the fact that there is a variance in how thirsty we feel depending on many different factors. The weather, how much salt we are consuming, whether we have trained, or whether we are drinking alcohol all play a role in how thirsty we feel. And just because we don’t feel thirsty doesn’t necessarily mean that our bodies aren’t losing fluids, there is a lag time between the fluid loss and our bodies’ registration of the thirst signal to our brains. For many of us in climate controlled environments most of the day excessive dehydration isn’t a huge concern, but for athletes and people working outside in hot climates, it is a major risk that needs to be discussed. These dehydration problems can get serious very quickly.

So, how much should you be drinking? Well, it definitely depends on your size and your activity level, but there is a starting point we can use as a rule of thumb. Most adults need around three liters(L) of water, which for everyone using the english system is a little less than 1 gallon of water. It doesn't have to be just straight water, other fluids count as fluid intake. Some fluids like sodas and alcohol aren’t very valuable to your system, so I typically don’t count them toward fluid intake, but most other things can be included. I know that sounds like a heck of a lot of water to get down for an average sized person!

Just know that you may get a whole liter of fluids from the food that you eat, taking it down to 2L a day, something that sounds much more manageable. If you’re a larger person, you will still need to be closer to that gallon mark. If you're sick, and especially if you're losing fluid through vomiting or diarrhea, your fluid and electrolyte intake will need to be increased. If it's warm and dry, you may need another few cups of water a day. And if you're exercising a whole heck of a lot you could potentially need up to like six liters of fluid per day, so there are clearly a lot of factors to keep in mind when looking at hydration! If you’re going to begin drinking 3L of water per day, and this is interrupting your life because your going to the bathroom so much, you may want to reduce your fluid intake until you adapt to the higher amount.

Again, just because you're in a comfortable environment does not mean that you're not losing fluid. Everything passes through our skin as it is the main medium between our internal bodies and the external environment. There's a lot of heat and water that gets lost just through your skin.

By no means is keeping up with hydration easy, I know I have trouble with it!. Most of us are in a mild state of dehydration at all times. To keep up with this, I have a water bottle with me at all times, because if I don’t have constant access I will not get enough fluids in. Personally, I like to have a water bottle that is a full liter in size, because I have to fill it up less and will naturally get more water in.

Percentage of body weight is the main measure we look at for the consequences of water loss.. With ½%, there is increased strain on the heart, with 1%, we see a reduction in aerobic endurance. This is why you see athletes in endurance sports are always on top of their hydration levels. At 3% we see reduced muscular endurance while at 4% we see reduced muscular strength, a reduction in motor skills, and heat cramps. At 5% heat exhaustion begins with cramping, fatigue, reduced mental capacity and at 6% we see physical exhaustion, heat stroke, and coma. Once an individual hits 10 to 20% they are probably going to face death. So we want to make sure we're keeping fluids in at all times. Very regular consumption. Most people shouldn’t have an issue with this.

It’s easy to monitor percentage of body weight lost due to exercise: simply weigh yourself before a training session and then again after the session. Those two numbers will tell you how well you are hydrating during the training session.

Now, I mentioned before, there's often a lag between becoming mildly dehydrated and your body's signal to let you know you're actually thirsty. So we tend to not even notice thirst until we've lost 1 to 2% of our body water. As I just mentioned, at this point it is already having some negative effects on our performance. So just as a reminder, this is increased strain on the heart and reduce the aerobic endurance. And beyond that, we start to get into some pretty unpleasant things. Other side effects that can happen outside of just performance implications include headache, fatigue, low blood pressure, dizziness, fainting, nausea, and even rapid heart rate.

The goal here is to simple: always make sure if you're working out in the heat or, your job requires you to be in an extreme environment of some kind (hey, this includes athletes!) that you always have access to fluids and be sure that you're rehydrating regularly. If we do that, then we should be all set and stay out of trouble.

Since you’re here: We have a small favor to ask! At SAPT, we are committed to sharing quality information that is both entertaining and compelling to help build better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage us authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics.

Thank you! SAPT