Recovery
The part of training where the adaptation actually happens.
Recovery
Video · 7:00 · coming soon
In this lesson
- Recognise the difference between fatigue and overreaching
- Use sleep and food as training variables
- Structure a deload before you need one
Coaching cue — Training is the stimulus. Recovery is where you get better.
The thing nobody trains
Training does not make you fitter. Training makes you tired; recovering from training makes you fitter. Somebody who trains six hard days a week and sleeps six hours a night is worse-conditioned than somebody who trains four and sleeps eight.
Sleep
The single largest lever, and the least popular answer. Seven to nine hours. Reaction time, technique retention and injury risk all track sleep more closely than they track any supplement or protocol.
If you can only fix one thing on this page, fix the time you go to bed.
Food, briefly
- Eat enough. Boxers under-eat more often than they over-eat, especially when trying to hold a weight. Under-eating shows up first as poor recovery, then as illness.
- Protein at every meal. Roughly a palm-sized portion, three or four times a day.
- Carbohydrates around training. Rounds are glycolytic; low-carbohydrate training makes hard sessions worse without making easy sessions better.
- Water. Boring but real. Dehydration of two percent measurably reduces power output.
Reading fatigue
| Signal | What it means |
|---|---|
| Sore the day after a hard session | Normal |
| Still sore three days later | You did too much, or ate and slept too little |
| Resting heart rate up 5–10 bpm | Under-recovered — take an easy day |
| Technique degrading week to week | Overreaching, not undertrained |
| Losing interest in training | Almost always fatigue, rarely motivation |
Deloads
Every fourth or fifth week, halve the volume. Keep the skill work, drop the rounds and intervals. You will feel worse for three days and noticeably better afterwards.
Plan the deload in advance. A deload you take because you are broken is called an injury.
Drill it
For the next two weeks, write down your resting heart rate on waking and your bedtime. Nothing else. At the end of two weeks the pattern will tell you more about your training than any session you did in it.
That completes the gym. The fundamentals, the feet, the defence and the engine — everything after this is refinement.