Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

[lightreads]

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

3/5. Review of various exercise recovery trends and modalities – specialized hydration and nutrition, cryotherapy, compression, supplements, etc. etc. It's probably not a spoiler to say that the only thing for which we have clear effectiveness evidence is sleep. Everything else is probably a placebo, though there can be some value in that. Worth reading for the weekend warrior (I was one of those once, and hey, I went running* last night after the baby was in bed, so there).

*Well…trotting. Screw my achilles. Screw my weird and somewhat frightening post-partum joint pain.

Comments

[halojedha]

Huh, interesting! I swear by glutamine to help with DOMS, but without a control it's impossible to be sure.

[lightreads]

Yeah part of the problem is that it's hard to study some of this stuff, and the studies we get are either run by the person trying to sell it, or poorly designed, or hard to design (it's hard to have a double-blind, for example, on cryotherapy, as the subjects can obviously tell what group they're in). But when we do get good evidence, it tends to be negative. I definitely leaned hard into that brief period where everyone swore chocolate milk was the best long run recovery drink, though, because sometimes it's about the ritual or the hit of pleasure or just the belief that you are doing something to help your body. And hey, who knows, maybe it was better than water anyway.

[treewishes]

Huh. R is still recovering from the big race 10 days ago, mostly with lots of sleep. Maybe the best thing for it :)