Michele Ionno, our Recover Lead, is a Doctor of Physical Therapist and not a Psychologist nor a mental health counselor of any kind. The articles written during Recover Week may at times reference mental health or mental skills training. When this occurs, it is only Dr. Ionno, DPT, bringing these important topics to your attention. The information should be taken only as entertainment and his opinion but if interested, we are happy to connect you to one of our colleagues in the Psychology profession to explore these topics further. In fact, we recommend each of you include a Psychologist on your Performance & Wellness Team. Do you want to learn more information on the topics we’ve introduced here? Are you ready to seek the help or services of a mental health clinician? If so, you could start at the American Psychological Association, National Register of Health Service Psychologists, or the Association for Applied Sports Psychology. If you do not find what you are looking for, reach out to us and we will happily help you find a licensed provider in your area.
Direct resolution of acquired stress.
Active Recovery is defined as any action you take that has a direct impact on your body’s stress levels. The stress that active recovery impacts can be positive or negative, beneficial, or harmful. Positive stress usually comes from exercise. Obviously, negative stress could come from a conflict that you had at home (mental stress), a challenging day at the job (mental or physical stress), or even at the gym (deciding to do squats the day after you run your first 10k in 10 years).
Stress is unavoidable. Identify it. Address it.
Active recovery is important because stress is both unavoidable in life and essential to self-improvement. First, let’s discuss how it is unavoidable. Any activity you do in life takes energy. How much and what kind of energy (mental or physical) depends on the activity. Each of us woke up today with a level of function that was determined mostly by our previous habits and activities. Once we go about our day, stressful events occur and the stress you absorb is directly related to the way you processed stress from the day before. Some of these stressful events were positive (like a workout) and some of them were negative (like fighting a fire all night long). If your body and mind have not addressed the stress from yesterday, the stress (good or bad) your body and mind retains will accumulate (good or bad).
Thought experiment: You go to class. The teacher writes on the board. Class ends but the board is not erased. Repeat this for multiple days. Quickly, new things are impossible to understand or learn. The teacher is just writing over the stuff that was there already!
Life is the teacher.
Your body and mind are the board.
Stress is the writing on the board.
We will talk about the importance of retaining control over the kinds of stress in your life at a later time. For now, let’s talk about how you respond to these stressful events and how you can come away from them better than you were before.
Doesn’t it just take care of itself?
It does. Kinda. Successful recovery includes …
Proper nutrition and hydration to replenish your energy storage and recuperate from the physiological damage.
(Physical life stress) Continuous low-level physical activity to clear cellular waste and facilitate repair of muscle damage.
and/or
(Mental life stress) Processing of the feelings of an impactful experience and coming to accept the balance of your resolve to overcome the bad with an appreciation for the good.
Between mental skills, physical skills, coping skills, sleep, and habits, most of us obtain some level of recovery whether intentional or not. That’s why the answer to “Doesn’t it just take care of itself?” is actually “Yeah, kinda.”
The problem is when the stressful events you face become more challenging than your not-really-trying recovery can overcome.
This is especially true during the trying times you are facing as tactical athletes. Hell, even those of you who are sport athletes have had a difficult stretch because of the pandemic. Some of you are probably having to chew big bites of reality regarding your nutrition, work capacity, and stress management.
The quality and purposefulness of your active recovery techniques dictate the efficiency of your stress management. For example, look at Figure 1 below, with active recovery being represented by the line in the red boxes. The benefits of the recovery in the left box were not realized like that in the present.[Note: We’ll talk about the red arrows/passive recovery later. For an introduction to all these points, watch the Introduction to Recovery webinar completed for OTOA]
Here’s an example:
You have decided to get back in the gym and finished your first squat workout in a few months.
You know what’s coming next!
That painful, achy feeling every time you move your legs, especially getting up from a chair or descending a flight of stairs. What you do next will determine how beneficial that workout was. If you use active recovery techniques, which you will learn more about in future posts and from our coaching products, you will a) decrease how sore you are and/or b) increase how quickly it goes away. Other than relieving the temporary agony that you might be experiencing, utilizing an active recovery technique will facilitate your general activity level over the next couple of days. While it is great that you are back in the gym, it would be a detriment for you to be glued to a chair at work and home because of those sore legs. So instead, let’s think about things you can do in the short-term, mid-term, and long-term to optimize your recovery.
What to do?
Short-term: Make sure to fuel immediately after your workout (30 minutes is optimal. ASAP is acceptable). You can work with our Fuel Lead to determine what fuel and how much is best for your goals.
Mid-term: Foam roll that night (every night is best) to massage out the sore and injured muscles that were damaged during the workout. You can work with me, our Recover Lead, to determine what plan is best for optimizing your lifestyle and schedule.
Long-term: Include some low-level physical activity the next day or plan to work the upper body in your next workout. Of course, you can work with our Move Lead to create a workout plan that is optimized for your goals and work demands.
The negative effects of sitting are well documented and while it’s great that you mustered the courage and discipline to get back to the gym, you run the risk of lowering your baseline because of the sedentary lifestyle you temporarily assume while waiting for those sore muscles to feel better. Rather, if you did some active recovery techniques in the hours and days following the workout, you will feel better and be more active. This will create supercompensation, so the next time you exercise you will be a little bit better than you were before.
In Figure 1, notice that the second life stress event occurs at a higher level of performance and wellness than the first one. This means you can work harder in the next positive stress event or be less affected by the next negative stress event. This is exactly why some of us struggle to get into and stay in shape. Without active recovery, it is literally one step forward and two steps back.
Negative stress: Next, let’s use these concepts to make a positive difference with some of the work that law enforcement, first responders, and the military deal with regularly: traumatic events. As many of you likely have experienced, traumatic events are an unavoidable part of the work needed to protect and serve our communities and country. Although the circumstances are wildly different, dealing with these stressful experiences is not. Just like with exercise, the concept of Figure 1 applies here as well. Each day you wake up, you are a mixture of the previous life experiences you have had. At work, no matter your role in the event, you might deal with something difficult to process. Utilizing active recovery tools, such as journaling or counseling will help you to experience what is called post-traumatic growth.
This growth only occurs when your mind is given the opportunity to process the thoughts and feelings that arose from the challenging event that is unavoidable as a part of your job. Remember, this applies to sports too. Making a critical error that costs your team the game can be traumatic, despite not being life-or-death. The point is that failure or tragedy is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid in life. Therefore, learning to cope, grow, and improve from these events is crucial.
Without active recovery, you run the risk of developing negative and harmful associations that are connected to the traumatic event. These connections can fester in your mind and start to infect other aspects of your life or your performance during subsequent events. The FMR Team will help give you the tools and resources needed to deal with these challenges. But you need to have the desire to fix it, the courage to act, and vulnerability to ask for help. It is unavoidable that you have to experience these difficult events, so many of us can not even imagine, but what is avoidable is the effect these events have on you, your job performance, and your personal wellbeing.
Common Active Recovery techniques
Foam rolling for sore muscles after a workout
Having a protein shake after your workout
Eating a full balanced meal after a strenuous shift at work.
Writing about your feelings and thoughts after a traumatic experience
Spending quality time with friends and family to balance the hardships of work.
Talking to someone who can help you process your experiences
We will talk more about this as time goes on so stay tuned!
“If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” - Fred Rogers
This quote summarizes the FMR approach to active recovery. Everything is always worse in your head, this includes the remedies for dealing with life stress. Good or bad, if you develop a healthy and productive routine of dealing with the stress you encounter, the Good will last longer and the Bad will be gone sooner.
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