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After mountain bike world champion and Olympic athlete Kate Courtney pulled out of the final World Cup race in Snowshoe, West Virginia, this past September—following a massive crash during the XCC short track race the previous day—she put up an Instagram post:
“Time to reset! It’s no secret this season has been very challenging and yesterday my mind and body hit the limit. Now it’s time to take the real break that is needed so I can reset and build back stronger next year. Thank you to my team, sponsors, family for being there to get me through this. Off season starts now ❤️”
The first comment out of the gate was from fellow Red Bull athlete and seven-time world champion Rebecca Rusch: “Welcome to your off season! Recovery is when the real growth happens. You fought hard and never gave up and that’s what champions do.”
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Recovery. Reset. Off-season. As athletically inclined—whether recreational or elite—riders, we’ve all heard those terms. But what does that really mean? Why does the growth happen when we’re not on our bikes? And how do we make sure we’re doing it right? (Spoiler alert: most of us aren’t!)
“We all like to go, go, go and push, push, push. But that’s not when you get stronger. You get stronger when you rest,” Rusch told Bicycling. “And just as you train at different intensities to improve your gains, you have to rest at different intensities, too. You have day-to-day recovery, regular restoration, and annual rejuvenation. You need all three to really excel.”
Rusch credits this three-pronged recovery practice for her longevity as a professional athlete. It’s something her world-renowned coach, Tim Cusick, founder of BaseCamp and Velocious Cycling Adventures, preaches to all his athletes. And it’s an aspect of training that he feels is increasingly overlooked if not completely lost in the age of year-round online and on-demand indoor training.
“One of the negative consequences of the explosion of indoor training is many people are getting slower… not faster,” Cusick says.
It’s not that indoor training is bad, of course. It’s that people aren’t adhering to the basic training principles that include rest and recovery. They’re training harder and recovering less. That’s a recipe for stalling out and backsliding.
Recover as Hard as You Train
At the most basic level, training works like this: You place your body under a stress load, you give it time to recover, and you bounce back stronger. But endurance athletes tend to skimp on that time-to-recover part, thinking they can push their way forward to the gains they want.
“Endurance athletes like cyclists often try to take on what I call ‘the forever load,’” Cusick says. “They think if they keep building and building, they’ll get stronger and stronger. It doesn’t work that way. Everything we do in exercise comes with a consequence, mainly in the form of fatigue. Fatigue follows the same pattern of training, but in the inverse.”
You need to recover as hard as you train. That means matching the type of resting you’re doing with the type of load you’re putting on your body, which is where the three R’s come in: recovery, restoration, and rejuvenation. Read on to learn what they are and what they do.
Recovery: Keep the systems running
You can think of recovery as the steps you take to help your body repair from the acute training of the day or week during any given training cycle. You’re recovering from the types of fatigue you feel in your muscles—like when the stairs are suddenly really steep—from training and racing.
This takes the shape of recovery drinks, foam rolling, massage guns, proper sleep schedules, and nutrition that helps you work out the knots, restore muscle glycogen, promote muscle repair, and give your cardiovascular system a little rest. This includes your daily self-care practices, as well as recovery days and easier weeks in your monthly training cycle.
Rusch likes to include daily meditation as part of this process. “Meditation really helps with recovery. Quieting your mind for just 5 or 10 minutes a day teaches your body to calm down on demand, which helps manage stress and promotes recovery, especially since it also helps you fall asleep more easily at night. And sleep is essential for recovery,” she says.
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Restoration: A regular reboot
Even if you respect your recovery, acute levels of training and racing add up, and at some point you need a reboot so the systems that support training and performance can reset, Cusick explains.
“This is in response to your chronic load—the accumulation of those acute training cycles. It leads to chronic fatigue, which is not as obvious as acute fatigue and can sneak up on you,” he says. This type of chronic fatigue occurs in your immune, endocrine (hormone), and central nervous systems, which all work together during training, sending signals back and forth and driving adaptations. When one of those systems gets fatigued, the signal and response get weaker and you stop making gains.
“You may still be able to do the work, but at this point you’re in a state of non-functional overreaching,” Cusick says. “You’re no longer able to adapt. So your performance will plateau, you become inconsistent and, if you keep pressing on, will eventually decline. You need to downregulate these systems so they can reset. You do that by taking one or two deeper rests where you’re off the bike for a week or two every year.”
This doesn’t mean you’re not doing any training. You’re just training something different. “This is a great time to work on yoga, meditation, and grounding activities like walking in the woods. It lets those chronically taxed systems recover and adapt so you can continue to make progress,” Cusick says
“I spend this time walking, doing a little strength training, and doing stuff around the house like gardening, light yard work, and vacuuming—things that aren’t taxing but keep me active and give my mind and body a rest from training stress,” Rusch says. The result: She comes into the next training cycle stronger and raring to go. “Your fitness progress isn’t linear. You can take it up, but then you have to let it come down a bit, so it can go up again even higher.”
Cusick recommends planning your seasons around these breaks, which is the exact opposite of what most of us do when we’re cramming in every event we want to ride or race.
Rejuvenation: A hard reset
This is a 3- to 8-week period (depending on your age and training) when you put down the bike for a bit and give yourself a proper off season, letting go of the structure and stress and completely clearing your mind.
“Too many athletes end one season with their next season planned. That means you’re ending the season unsatisfied with a busy mind and voices in your head. You need to fully let go. You should never plan until after you restore,” Cusick says. “Always trying to look forward while you’re under stress muddies the water so you can’t clearly see what you want to do and what you’re capable of doing.”
Cusick breaks this off-season rejuvenation phase down into three phases:
Off the bike rest: Here you take a week and really do nothing but walk the dog and chill out. Somewhat ironically, younger athletes can take more complete downtime, while those 50 and older should limit this period to a week because you don’t want to let go of too much fitness with age, because it takes longer to ramp back up.
Functional strength: This is not quite training yet, but preparing your body to start training again. Take 3 to 5 weeks to focus on functional—but not heavy—strength training like lunges, bodyweight squats, planks, and pushups.
Alternate endurance exercise: Along with functional strength, round out this rejuvenation period with alternate endurance exercise like walking, hiking, running (if you’re an experienced runner; this shouldn’t be taxing), along with a little bit of easy cycling. This shouldn’t be hard at all and shouldn’t be structured—just moving your body for the enjoyment of it.
“This is a great time to connect with the other parts of your life again,” Rusch says. “Spend time with your family and do things that are emotionally rewarding that you’ve put aside while you’re training and racing. I like to clean out closets and do all those house projects that have gone undone. It just feels good to reset life. That’s when you’re really ready to go again.”
