As I stated in Part 1 of this quartet of articles, after explaining the need to monitor your heart rate and blood pressure, and to keep a training diary as a useful tool to aid your training, now I would like to examine the training factor of restoration shown in detail. As you can see from the diagram below, restoration, or resting so as to recover between training sessions, is the key to your success in long distance running. However, a great many people who train for long distance running do not realise this, train too hard, do not allow enough rest, and leave their races behind in their training. So read on to find out how to recover, how to restore your body before training again, and particularly, before training hard again.
Exercise 1: Which parts of the process of training and super-compensation require that you rest and as a result your body receives restoration?
Post question: What training benefit do you gain during restoration? You need to know:
1. How to aid restoration of the skeletal-muscular system
2. How to aid restoration of the cardio-respiratory system
3. How to restore the exchange process
4. What to do if you have overtrained
5. Nutrition – what food you need
6. Nurture psychological restoration
7. Lifestyle – yours!
In this first part I examine the second of these seven items.
How to aid restoration of the cardio-respiratory system
I introduce the cardio-respiratory system and how it works in the two articles about MaxVO2:
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/trai...
and
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/trai...
There are four sections in explaining how to succeed with restoration of your cardio-circulatory system:
1. Physical restoration and preventative maintenance of the cardio-circulatory system
2. Illness
3. Medical means of recuperation e.g. nutrition
4. Training cycles using incomplete restoration
So here is the first of these four sections.
1. Physical restoration and preventative maintenance of the cardio-circulatory system
Focus Question: Why and how much attention should be given to allowing your cardio-circulatory system to recover and to prevent damage to it?
You need to pay attention to your cardio-circulatory system throughout the entire yearly cycle of training (illustrated in the diagram below). If your training’s physical loads are too much for the cardio-circulatory system, you will not improve, and even worse, your running ability will decline. If you don’t recover between hard intensive training sessions, a pathology of decline will set in.
Post Question: If your results start getting worse, how will you react psychologically? So how important is restoration between training sessions to you?
