From Olivier Leroy: Faster Recovery

I am constantly on the lookout for new fancy ways to improve my swimming. Whether it is a technique correction, continually refining and improving my habits, or eating better (sorry body, I will never give up movie theater popcorn), I love stumbling across little hacks and tricks to help me swim like a certified gangster. While going over some of my workouts from the past year I notice a pattern that made me feel a little, well, silly. Almost every time I had a full night of rest (a minimum of 8 hours) the next day I would bang out a great workout. Not every time, but pretty darn close. Enough that it certainly made me realize that while all the hacks and tricks and tips were great, nothing could replace the effects of getting a quality, full night of rest. Research done at Stanford with their NCAA Div 1 swim teams backs this up. After 6 weeks of additional sleep (an extra 1-2 hours per night compared to what the swimmers were getting before), the results were very noticeable: The swimmers were 0.15 seconds faster off of the blocks. They were just over half a second faster in a 15m sprint. (That alone is insane.) And their turn time was a tenth of a second faster. Look… Swimmers push themselves.  Hard. We have crazy long seasons, crazy long workouts, and for many of us, slightly crazy coaches. Combined with school, work and what little social life we have it makes for a hectic schedule. So much so that we cut corners for time where we can, and usually the first place we go to is our sleep. Does this mean you should be sleeping in as late as possible? Probably not if you have things like school, a job or practice. But it does mean that you should make a more consistent effort to get the Z’s in. That’s just one of the effects of using a log book. You notice things you might not otherwise. The big picture stuff that would go otherwise unnoticed in the daily grind of our swimming.