Last week, we looked at an approach to injury management — how to stay consistent, train around the issue, and work toward full recovery without wrecking yourself. A safe, sensible, self-guided path.
Unless you can’t move, you, sure as hell, don’t rest. You move as much as the injury and pain allow. By modifying any relevant injury-affected exercises or, if you have to, dropping them altogether, you can continue training and that, of course, does so much to keep everything else in order.
And you hit it with a couple of targeted drills to regain mobility and strength.
I’m happy to say power is back on the menu this past week—not with hill sprints or jumping (that’ll be a while yet), but with swimming: 50m of flat-out freestyle. Very different to hill sprints, but also serving as the same edge-of-potential stimulus.
But even as this training side of the picture fills in, becoming more complete by the day, when it comes to an all-things-considered fitness practice, it is only one piece of the puzzle.
So today, we’ll look at the other equally important factors, beginning with the trickiest of all.
NUTRITION
Injury usually means less incidental movement and/or training volume. In my case, while I trained around it where possible, as detailed, even had the pool balanced out 15-20km a week of running, and I doubt it, I’m still missing 6-10 hours of jujutsu from the output side of the energy equation.
In my favour is the fact that both the acute and recovery phases of injury are metabolically demanding and can be 15-50% above baseline; nonetheless, if I don’t account for any difference, there will be a good deal more of me by the time I’m able to balance the ledger.
Which is only to state the obvious, if not often overlooked, but I raise it here only to make the point that in a battle of two ills, that would be a far better outcome than over-correcting. When you're trying to heal, hold onto lean muscle, and keep stress low, injury is not the time to cut calories.
But neither does that mean I’m eating whatever I feel like, in whatever quantity. No, I’m ensuring sufficient protein—the raw material of injury repair and muscle retention. Helpfully, this increases satiety, making empty calories less likely, but, of course, whole foods and a balanced diet are only more important in aiding recovery.
In any case, both my continued training and lean muscle afford me some wiggle room, but I’ll keep an eye on all the markers I typically do, and if things start to move in the wrong direction, I’ll do something about it.
Alongside continued training and recovery-focused nutrition comes the third and, hopefully, most obvious side of the triumvirate, and where most of the healing magic happens.
SLEEP
Go to bed early enough that you will wake for whatever you need to be awake for without an alarm— the singular sign you are getting enough quality rest.
Failing that, sleep as much as you can.
Injury can often interfere with sleep, so in addition to finding positions or supports that allow rest, you can further help things along with a regular routine, early morning sun exposure, low evening light, and not eating within 3 hours of bed.
And—boringly, but crucially for both nutrition and sleep quality—no booze.
All of which might make a stay at the Leftfield Infirmary sound like the seventh circle of hell— especially if you’re of the rest-until-right and self-medicate with junk food and booze persuasion.
You’ll be happier to hear that, like any North Star, I suggest these more for directional, navigation purposes than visiting.
Have I enjoyed a tipple these past weeks? Yes. I’ve stayed up late and woken to the shrill of an alarm. I’ve eaten hot dogs and donuts and…I’m guilty of all, Your Honour.
But, considerably less than otherwise, were I not injured. Not a statement offered in defence, but only to underline that slavish allegiance here is as antithetical to Leftfield as anywhere else: to rep numbers, exercises, or meal plans.
And injury recovery competes for the same resources as job stress, family demands…
Every. Thing.
Acknowledging that our psychological and emotional bandwidth is also a recovery factor makes us less likely to overload the system with demands, pressure and expectations that we must do everything right.
When autoregulation governs effort, it must further govern expectations. That same easing of rigid, ‘perfect’ protocols in the broader scheme of things is similarly beneficial and Leftfield, as ever, offers a middle ground between polar extremes.
Do nothing. Or;
Do everything.
No thanks. Or to be most accurate: please yourself.
Personally, I’m only ever looking for enough, but my point is neither that you can’t or shouldn’t turn the screws in diet, sleep, exercise, every way possible for optimal recovery, but that there can only be one person who decides.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
Let’s narrow our focus to a single training session again, only this time we’ll narrow it further still and hypothetically assume two trainees who are identical twins and following identical programs with no differences in exercise progression/regression, fitness (strength, mobility, endurance) level or injury history.
Hopefully, you’ve recognised we’ve crossed into the absurd, but even within these impossibly narrow confines, there is still a difference, and they would undoubtedly record different rep totals reflective of how well they slept, stress levels, mood… everything else.
Which should first illustrate when a practice extends beyond training into life, and this same autoregulation is further accounting for even a fraction of the many more variables, it must, necessarily, be uniquely yours.
But secondly, to point to the fact that, over time, this autoregulation not only accommodates injury but, in the case of illness, can reveal it.
If my performance is >20% down across the board for no discernible reason, I now know I’ll be copping something within 4-5 days. I suspected but tried to deny this for years, knowing that even a pattern that isn’t there can still have a nocebo effect— less detecting sickness, than causing it— but now it is invariably my first symptom.
To be clear, numbers will go up and down for all sorts of reasons—indeed, that’s the point— but unless the cause is obvious, like no sleep, for example (and even then), it is never universal.
Unless some lurgy is in the post. And when it is, guess what I do?
I keep training. Well done. You make hay when the sun shines, sure, but not every training session needs to ‘build’ something, and at Leftfield, injury aside, if you’re tired, stressed or otherwise not feeling flash, a ‘tonic’ session is more in order—one in which you forgo ‘progress.’ There is no pressure to hustle or grind, because in the bigger picture— the long lens of a practice— you’ve always got time.
And not because that either runs contrary to, or sidelines ‘fitness’, but because there will be days you will be worse off for training with intent, but still— even with relatively severe illness— be undeniably better for:
Maintaining the habit of exercise
Early morning sun exposure
Fresh air
Gentle movement
And while getting up and out the door might be a bit more of a struggle, post-session, you’ll know it.
While this tempered approach certainly helps to reduce the likelihood of calamity, even so, we know, sooner or later, things are going to go sideways. And while an injury or illness can change everything, with an all-things-considered fitness practice, it’s no exaggeration to say it changes nothing.
Part and parcel of such a practice comes the simple acknowledgement that, even absent anything serious, it’s neither pessimistic nor dramatic to say:
Something is always wrong.
That's life. I don’t know how often you get all your ducks in a row — but if it ever happens in my life, it’s not for long. But with all things considered, you come to realise a fitness practice not fragile to the vagaries of life, or obnoxiously rigid in spite of it, but one aligned with it.
And it’s not that the practice just keeps on trucking, although that is true, but that this IS the practice. Never prescriptive, always adaptive —the gentle administering to what is.
The closer you get, the more differences you’ll find, but as you zoom out, and certainly over a longer time horizon, it’s all the same.
Taking the theory and putting it into practice. Making things doable. Giving the body and mind what they need.
In that moment.
That is Leftfield Training.
Not because I, from on high, decree it, but because your body and mind do. All you do is listen. But if you don’t want to listen to your body, don’t worry, you’ll find there is literally no end to second opinions.
The information economy is essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do.
Oliver Burkeman
Leftfield Youniversity starts Friday, June 27.
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Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI