Active restoration: it’s more than just lounging in front of the TV – Pete Williams

Recovery is more important than training! As functional medicine practitioner Pete Williams says, there is a strong case for making the most of the time you have between training sessions; a phrase he calls ‘active restoration’.

Science has continued to amaze us with how fantastically complicated the human body is and how much it is intimately tied up with its environment. We are now in the era of medicine which shows the complete interconnectedness of the human body: Indeed, literally every cell in our body is communicating with one another. With the knowledge that our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and environment impact physiologically on our body then we must consider this when developing training programmes for athletes.

For many years I have been proposing “The active restoration theory of overtraining”. By observing the scientific research and gaining clinical experience with athletes, it is my firm belief that it is not just the training that you do, but the ability to recover from it that really matters. I think to a large extent it is the lack of active restoration that causes reduced performance. It was nice to find a recent quote from Lance Armstrong who said; “It is the man who restores quickest that wins the race.” It still amazes me that many athletes do not know that training damages the body and only increases performance when given appropriate restoration!

I have created an ongoing list from scientific observations, which explains how an athlete can undergo active restoration between training sessions – Table 1.

Table 1 – Active Restoration List

With all the athletes that I see, I ask them to fill in a daily restoration log. Table 2 illustrates the sheet sent back to me from an international cyclist as an example.

This is quite a typical log entry and because some sporting events are won by thousandths of a second, then you might think that athletes would be looking for any opportunity to increase performance. It is important to identify the areas for your athlete’s improvement and to bring them to the front of their mind. Knowledge is key and with the cyclist example, there were clearly a multitude of new things for him to think about. I found that he was a really anxious person. Consistent anxiety negatively affects the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and therefore eats into long-term performance and recovery. I used a double active restoration approach here: Firstly I advised him to go to a counsellor who could help him with the anxiety, and secondly I used some herbal preparations designed to ease the anxiety slightly. I also introduced a laughter and comedy rule: we changed his TV routine to include programmes that would make him laugh at least three times a week. These are just a few simple examples that we must consider when dealing with athletes.

Restoration still seems to be an afterthought to many athletes, but I have no doubt that in time it will become as important as the training itself in the minds of the experts. In fact I would not be surprised if a new job description of “active restoration specialist” will be seen in the future. You heard it here first!