The Athletes Guide to Recovery is the first comprehensive, practical exploration of the art and science of athletic rest.
If you've hit a wall in your training, maybe it's because your body isn't recovering enough from each workout to become stronger. Hard workouts tear down the body, but rest allows the body to repair and come back stronger than before. Athletes who neglect their recovery will gain little from workouts, risking injury, overtraining, and burn out.
The Athlete's Guide to Recovery offers a full exploration of rest and recovery for athletes. In her book, certified triathlon and running coach and pioneering yoga for athletes instructor Sage Rountree will guide you to full recovery and improved performance, revealing how to measure your fatigue and recovery, how much rest you need, and how to make the best use of recovery tools.
Drawing on her own experience along with interviews with coaches, trainers, and elite athletes, Rountree details daily recovery techniques, demystifying common aids like ice baths, compression apparel, and supplements. She explains in detail how to employ restorative practices such as massage, meditation, and yoga. You will learn which methods work best and how and when they are most effective. The Athlete's Guide to Recovery explores:
Periodization and overtraining
Ways to measure fatigue and recovery including heart rate tests, heart rate variability, EPOC, and apps
Stress reduction
Sleep, napping, nutrition, hydration, and supplements
Cold and heat like icing, ice baths, saunas, steam rooms, whirlpools, and heating pads
Home remedies including compression wear, creams, and salts
Technological aids like e-stim, ultrasound, Normatec
Massage, self-massage, and foam rolling
Restorative yoga
Meditation and breathing
Then you can put these tools and techniques to practice using two comprehensive recovery plans for both short- and long-distance training.
This invaluable resource will enable you to maintain that hard-to-find balance between rigorous training and rest so that you can feel great and compete at your highest level.
Sage Rountree is a certified coach with USA Triathlon and the Road Runners Club of America. She is an internationally recognized authority on yoga for athletes and an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher with the Yoga Alliance. Her popular yoga classes for athletes draw students ranging from Ironman triathletes and Olympians to everyday cyclists, runners, and walkers, as well as team-sports athletes. A successful competitor in running and triathlon, she has raced distances ranging from the 400m to the 50K, super sprint triathlon to Ironman. Sage is a frequent contributor to Runner's World, Triathlete, and Yoga Journal magazines and has contributed to USA Triathlon Life, VeloNews, Running Times, Inside Triathlon, and Endurance magazines as well as several websites. She is a featured instructor at Kripalu and offers yoga workshops for athletes and coaches around the country. Sage is the author of The Athletes Guide to Yoga and The Athletes Pocket Guide to Yoga.
