Rest Is a Weapon
To achieve anything worth having you must have an incredible work ethic. I feel it’s imperative to work harder than your competition to get what you want, whether that be in hockey or life. It’s no different when it comes to training, you need to put the time to get the results you want. While working hard in the gym is important, if you’re not resting you are impeding your improvement.
Last hockey season I had a conversation with one of my teammates. He told me a story about a hockey mom who approached him at his local gym and started asking if he had tips to alleviate hip flexor/groin issues that her son was experiencing. Having played 20 years of professional hockey my teammate tried his best to help. The way the conversation was going my teammate thought for sure her son was 14-16 years old but when he asked, she said her son was only 9 years old.
When he told me about this conversation, I couldn’t believe it! A 9-year-old should never be having hip flexor/groin problems. And the reason a 9-year old would be having hip flexor/groin issues is because he or she is getting ZERO rest and is probably playing hockey 12 months of the year.
That’s absolutely insane!
Having said that, I see this a lot with some of the hockey players at the gym. They are constantly doing the same workouts each day and continue to skate year round. While it is important to improve your hockey skills if you want to make it to the next level, sometimes it’s more important to allow your body time to rest.
If we continue to do the same thing day after day, week after week and month after month we’ll stop seeing any type of improvement. The complete opposite will start to happen and we’ll actually start to notice a decline in performance and possibly develop some type of overuse injury (like the 9 year old above).
There are two types of recovery; Passive recovery and active recovery. Today I am going to talk about passive recovery and why it’s so important and how to start implementing it into your training program right away.
The definition of passive recovery is pretty simple. It’s when you do absolutely nothing. This is when you take a complete day off to relax and hang out on the couch. I feel it’s very important that you have at least 1 but no more than 2 passive recovery days in a training week. The harder your training program is the more passive recovery days you’ll need.
When training we actually do quite a bit of damage to our muscular system as well as our nervous system. This is normal. In order for our muscles to get bigger, stronger, and more explosive we must break down our muscles a little bit. But if you continue to break down the muscles and never allow for them to recover they will never have the chance to repair. Continuing this type of trend over time will eventually lead to overtraining and possibly an overuse injury.
One of the best ways to give the body the downtime and rest it needs to repair all the muscle fibers and restore the nervous system is by getting adequate sleep each night.
Sleep deprivation leads to the following:
- Decreased function at a high level
- Decreased speed
- Decreased reaction time
- Decreased positive mood
- Decreased testosterone
How much sleep do you need?
This number is determined on individual basis. Some athletes can get a full recovery from 7 hours of sleep while other athletes might need as much as 10 hours a night. If you are training between 4-6 hours per day you might need close to 12 hours of sleep in order to recover fully.
Sleep is recognized as the most important recovery strategy!
If you don’t get enough hours of sleep each night (whatever your sleep number is) you will go into what is called sleep debt.
Sleep debt can be classified as the amount of missed sleep that you should be obtaining each night. For example, let’s say you’re supposed to get 9 hours of sleep each night but for 3 nights out of the week you were only able to get 8 hours of sleep. You would then have a sleep debt of 3 hours. In order to pay back your sleep debt, you would have to sleep an extra hour per night to make it a total of 10 hours until you’ve made up for the 3 hours of sleep you lost. Sleep debt accumulates over time so you’ll want to make sure you pay back your debt as quickly as possible. One of the best ways to pay back your debt is by taking naps. Having said that, you’ll want to make sure you don’t nap longer than 90 minutes. Ideally, your nap will be around 30mins. Always make sure you don’t start your nap past 3 pm as this will affect your ability to fall asleep later that night.
To make sure you understand how important sleep is I want to share some numbers from a study that was done on Major League Baseball (MLB) players. The study followed 80 MLB players for a 3-year span and grouped the players into 3 categories. Normal sleep patterns, poor sleep patterns, severe sleep patterns.
After following the players for 3 years they found that 72% of the baseball players that were in the normal sleep pattern group were still playing while only 14% of the players who were classified as severe sleepers were still playing. To think, players who didn’t sleep enough shortened their careers is absolutely incredible.
Sleep not only helps with short-term recovery but it also has a huge implication on career longevity.