Athlete Recovery

Hello Everybody! 

 Today we have a very special article on the subject of athlete recovery. It is a special article because it was written by my friend and colleague, Graham Joseph. Graham and I had an interesting conversation on the topic of athlete recovery and he offered some great ideas on the subject. I asked if he was interested in writing an article for this site, and here we are! Enjoy! 

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“Recovery” is one of the many catch-all terms that is widely used across the sports medicine, performance, and coaching world. However, what does this term “recovery” really mean for athletes, and how does this translate to what strategies you implement in your clinical practice? With this post I will try and limit the cliché terms and explain how I consider recovery when dealing with patients and athletes.


I ask myself, what are we recovering from? I like to break this into three groups; 1) Central Fatigue, cognitive fatigue, or plain tiredness 2) Peripheral fatigue, decreased nerve sensitivity, or  ‘heavy legs’ 3) Cellular ‘fatigue’, muscular mechanical hyperalgesia, or DOMS. These three groups are all a result of stressors; physical, mental, emotional, or mechanical. 
For instance, you could have a patient or athlete enter your facility and report general fatigue, poor concentration, or bad mood and they could benefit from an increased focus of zone 1 maybe; TV, video games, reading etc. You could also have a patient or athlete that enters the facility walking like a zombie and it takes them 5 seconds to get in and out of a chair; they would benefit from an increased focus on zone 2 recovery. The distinction between zone 2 and 3 is subtle, but a focus on zone 3 recovery could be best for those patients or athletes that report to the facility feeling overall pretty good, but then they feel the soreness as they are asked to complete athletic movements. The chart below organizes some recovery options according to what type of fatigue the athlete is experiencing.


There are a multitude of products and protocols hitting the market all focused on recovery, when considering which modality to use I like to think about the 3 components of stress. I’m sure we can all agree that rest and time off is optimal, but that is a rarity in competitive sports unless you are the Golden State Warriors. So my question to you is which modalities are best for each stress response? I have put together some of the popular recovery modalities I have used and organized them by my application based on research and clinical practice. Are there others you like to use? Would you categorize a modality listed above differently? 
My final thought regarding this approach to recovery is with the three tier approach sleep and hydration is vital and all three areas of recovery should be addressed as part of a recovery session, but recovery can be individualized for each patient and the recovery session will change throughout the course of the competition season.

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Thank you Graham for your contribution! What a great way to analyze recovery methods that also considers their mental and emotional status. Please comment and share if you enjoyed!

Mark D.
@MarkDomATC


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