The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Coach Adam Pulford delivers actionable training advice and answers your questions in short weekly episodes for time-crunched cyclists looking to improve their cycling performance. The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast (formerly The TrainRight Podcast) is brought to you by the team at CTS - the leading endurance coaching company since 2000. Coach Adam pulls from over a decade of coaching experience and the collective knowledge of over 50+ CTS Coaches to help you cut throught the noise of training information and implement proven training strategies that’ll take your performance to the next level.
The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Are "Recovery Scores" Accurate? Does Recovery Slow With Age? Find out from Christie Aschwanden (#269)
OVERVIEW
Christie Aschwanden is an award-winning science journalist and author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. In Part 2 of her appearance on the "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast" we take a look at the evidence behind recovery scores from wearable fitness trackers. Christie also weighs in on the whether science supports the idea that older athletes need more recovery time.
TOPICS COVERED
- Is data from wearable sensors really accurate?
- Are "recovery scores" from fitness trackers accurate/meaningful?
- The effect of aging on recovery
- The benefit of stillness and relaxation for recovery
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Guest Bio – Christie Aschwanden:
Christie Aschwanden is an award-winning science journalist. She was the lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight for many years and is a former health columnist for the Washington Post. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, her writing has appeared in Outside, Discover, Smithsonian, and Oprah Magazine. She’s also co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast about the creative process. She was a high school state champion in the 1,600-meter run, a national collegiate cycling champion, and an elite cross-country skier with Team Rossignol. She lives and occasionally still races in western Colorado.
Read More About Christie Aschwanden:
https://christieaschwanden.com/
Book Link – Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery
HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
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From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now onto our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. Here alongside me again today is Christy Ashwandan, former elite athlete, author and recovery guru. Last week, we talked about some of the latest recovery strategies, all the data to monitor yourself and the implication of this recovery window post-exercise. Today, we'll be discussing concepts from her book Good to Go what the athlete in all of us can learn from the strange science of recovery. So, christy, thank you again for being back with us today.
Speaker 2:Oh, thanks so much for having me. Adam, Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Totally Well. One of one of the like best quotes, I think, from from your book is this quote about measuring stuff, Cause I love, I love data, okay, and the quote is this not everything that counts can be measured and not everything that can be measured counts. Can you please, please, explain that to us?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, you know, another sort of iteration of this that's popular is you know what gets measured, gets managed. And so the idea here there's a couple, a couple of different threads here. So one is that we seem to sort of have this impression that things that are measurable like if you can put a number on something, it's somehow better. Or you know less a number on something, it's somehow better. Or you know less more reliable than something that you're not I was gonna say, numberizing that's not a word, but you're not quantifying like that in the same way. But then the other part of this is that once you start measuring something, you start paying attention to it and it may not be the right thing to be paying attention to. And so I think that you know, and that quote that you read is sort of an iteration of a famous quote from General McNamara in the Vietnam War. You know, the idea here is that body counts and we know how off the rails that went. You know they're measuring the wrong thing and not not a good measure of success over whether you're winning the war. But I think that athletes can really fall into this trap too, and one of the problems now it's kind of a blessing and a curse. We can measure so many things now, and so you almost have I like to think of it as data obesity. You have so much data and it's like well, but what do we do with it?
Speaker 2:And like, the thing that I think you have to always ask yourself about any piece of data that you're collecting, any sort of thing that you're measuring, is why am I measuring this? What is it telling me, you know? What is it? What can it tell me, you know? Is it really measuring the thing that counts or that I care about, and how do I know that it's accurate? And then not only that what will I do with that information once I have it? Like, will it change what I'm doing? Because a lot of times you're collecting data that actually, no matter which way it goes, it's not going to change anything that you're doing. So what are you doing? Collecting it? You know you're sort of using time and resources to do that. It may not be something that's helping you. Does that answer the question?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think you know one of my original questions is going to be well, should everyone have a whoop or an aura ring or only all these things? Right? And I, and I think I mean I think you've already answered that and I think, from the coaching side of things, I'll admit like I'm just like, yeah, the data obesity is just like we're measuring a crap ton of stuff.
Speaker 1:that is just kind of noise and nonsense right now. My hope is that data companies and stuff may find like a thread that goes through it all and then we can use some of this, but I think a lot of it's garbage, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know, when I was working on the book I tried out a whole bunch of these personal you know devices, the trackers, and everyone, almost every one of them, has some sort of recovery score.
Speaker 2:And you know they won't tell you how they come up with them, except that you can kind of figure out what they're measuring and know. Well, you know it's almost always based on heart rate or HRV or whatever it is that they're measuring and all of that, and that's fine. But the problem is, you know, I would wear, I would go out for a run or a ride or workout wearing four devices and they would give me completely different recovery scores. You know, and they're looking at it. And meanwhile, you know, I know how I'm feeling and you know, at this point in my career I was sort of experienced enough to sort of know for myself how to read that. And so oftentimes these recovery scores were just very contrary to where I knew I was at. But the thing that happens is they say I'm saying, well, I feel pretty tired, and the recovery score is saying, oh, you're great, you're good to go, and then it kind of creates this doubt, right, Like, okay, I know I should trust myself. But can I? You know and I think that that's an aspect that people don't appreciate that it can actually be detrimental because it can create doubt or it can create false impressions, and it's really interesting.
Speaker 2:So one of the things is sleep scores. You know, some of them purport to tell you, like, how well you slept, how much REM you got, and I'll just say any sort of like consumer-based wearable is probably not going to do a good job of this sort of thing. I think that they can be perfectly reasonable for sort of big picture figuring out how much, how many hours, you slept, whatever. If it was super restful or not, Maybe. Maybe not Depends on how you sleep, but I don't. I would say that they're useless. But they will purport to tell you data that's more sort of granular than it really can claim to be. And part of the issue here too, if you're wearing a wrist-based thing, you're just not going to get super accurate heart rate data. So anything that's telling you that it's telling you complex stuff off of heart rate, if it's coming from a watch watch is just not going to be that reliable. Now, I know they're getting better, but you really need a chest strap to get good data on that and what we have is sort of this issue of garbage in, garbage out. So if I'm tracking data but the data themselves are not very reliable or very good, that's not going to be helpful, right? And so your question was sort of like should everyone be using these? And I would say the answer is no, at the same time, I wouldn't tell people, no, no, you shouldn't use them.
Speaker 2:I think the key here is to figure out, you know from the get-go decide what is it that I'm trying to learn from this, what am I hoping that it will tell me and what information do I need to ascertain that? So I want to know if I'm sleeping enough. How am I going to do that? Okay, know that it can't tell me, like deep REM or things like that, but maybe I just need to track how many hours of sleep. That's good, and I think that's something that everyone should be tracking and it's a really good.
Speaker 2:Sleep is actually the number one recovery tool, by the way. I mean nothing else comes even close. I mean even nutrition, whatever. I mean nothing else comes even close. Like, I mean even nutrition, whatever. Sleep is number one, and so you know, tracking that is fine and figure out, you know, but don't put too much weight into it. You know you have issues now where people actually get anxiety about their sleep because they're getting feedback from the tracker and the tracker may not be accurate. So that can be really detrimental. So there can be a downside to that and I think asking yourself how am I going to use this data? Also making sure that it's, you know, accurate enough and that it's able to tell you you know the things that you're wanting it to tell you.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, and and you know, for those watching on YouTube, you you probably see me flailing my my hands here and I have two rings, one of which is a wedding ring, one of which is also the aura ring, and you say well, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. Adam said, christy, it keeps on evolving. I do think we're getting better in some of these wearable things, but it also keeps me able to speak on some of this data, because I somebody who has absolutely no clue on how they sleep and what time you went to bed and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:It can help bring awareness to that and then that awareness can help improve habit. So if you wear this and you say, wow, my aura ring needs to tell me a crown sleep score, that's what I want, and you can gamify your sleep. Okay, cool, Now it's a positive tool in that. But as soon as it starts to stress you out about your life and your training, it's like, okay, now you're missing the message. So yeah we're again brand neutral. We're not endorsing this Feel free to explore it, but do so with little anxiety.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the other thing is it's really important to pair those data with a good training log and so really paying attention. So the athlete is saying, okay, how do I feel? You know, while I was doing so, I have a whole chapter in the book about data and I was genuinely hoping and expecting that I was going to find this perfect thing. You know what is the perfect recovery score? How do we know if you're recovered? It turns out there isn't one specific thing like that, but the very best and sort of most powerful ways is mood, and there's actually a little quiz that I have in my book of mood score. Jack Raglin is the researcher behind it and it's basically like how well did you sleep? How did you feel in your workout yesterday? How are you feeling today? You know, are you feeling moody? Things like that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I had one coach, neil Henderson, that I interviewed for the book, who said, you know, he'll sometimes ask his athlete's roommate or spouse. You know, oh yeah, is he moody? Or you know, is he being a jerk? Yeah, because that's a really good. When you're sort of on the rivet and you're getting to that point of being overtrained, people tend to get really moody. They get, you know, in a bad mood, and it may be sometimes too, you know, people will not feel like training. And so what happens to these, you know, really driven athletes is they say, oh, I don't even feel like training, and they beat themselves up like, oh, I'm a real loser, now I need to change my attitude. You know, it's like no, your body is begging you to take a rest day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's it and I think you know on Training Peaks they've redone a lot of different things, including including mood in on their metrics.
Speaker 1:And I put that on my athletes um kind of like a homepage of sorts and encourage some of my athletes or try to encourage most of my athletes do that. But uh, when it matters to track the mood as well as a sleep time and all all this kind of stuff, so it's, it's very important in that way, and the first question I think I always ask my athletes is how are you feeling? Like?
Speaker 2:how are the legs, what's the mood, as it should be? And I think you know part of this too is just training them to like check in daily. So if you make that part of the training log, okay, how am I feeling? So, yeah, go ahead. You know, note your hrv if you want to. You know, what you may find is that, you know, for you hrv is not useful, or maybe it is in a certain way, or or, you know, I had one friend who said, yeah, he noticed every time that he had drank the night before, his HRV went a little wiggly, and that's, you know, that's feedback. That's useful, right, but I think just paying attention and seeing what do those numbers mean for me is really helpful, exactly. And I think over time you can say, okay, I don't, you know, at some point you may not need that heart rate monitor anymore, you may not need to look at that thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for some of my athletes I kick the data to the curb for a while during their off seasons and things like this, because I think mentally and from the mood standpoint it definitely improves stuff.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:So we've got about eight minutes left here, christy, before we need to jettison this, but real quick, just give us, like, the 90-second version of aging on recovery. Does recovery actually slow as we get older?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, I wish the answer was no, but it's not yeah. Yeah, it definitely slows. Yeah, not entirely sure why, and it's not like a linear, like OK, you hit 40 and you're wrecked or anything like that. It happens over time and different people. Yes, some of it will depend a little bit too on your history of training and, and you know, as you get older, you know there are times in your life when you can kind of skirt on previous training too and there comes a time when you're like, oh, I can't do that anymore. You know, and that will happen.
Speaker 2:But yeah, recovery does take more time as you get older. But the good news is, you know, if you respect that and if you give yourself that extra recovery, you can still train at a pretty high level. It's not a given that you're just your performance is going to just crash Now. It will go go down over time. That's unavoidable. But I think you know, really, the training load and training effort is important and you can. Basically, you're going to have to maybe reduce your hours a little bit, adjust your training, increase your recovery, but it is possible to keep performing at a higher level. But that, if anything, I think recovery just becomes more important, and I think one thing that so often happens and I know this was true for me is when I was younger, I just I didn't always take recovery seriously enough, and you can get away with things in your twenties that you can't in your forties.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yes, exactly, and you know there are some some other kind of hacks in in good pieces of information in your book on that, especially around like protein. But I'm going to say, everybody listening who's curious about aging and recovery, pick up the book and read it, because that chapter in particular is awesome and people need to embrace the fact that, yeah, you just can't recover as fast when you're you know 40 plus 50 plus.
Speaker 1:Everybody's a little different, but read the book on that. I want to be sure to get to this last bit, because you said recovery the best recovery is sleep.
Speaker 1:I really agree with you on that and I think anybody who knows what's up would agree. But you also talk about your journey of recovery and kind of finding what works best for you, and it was like stillness in the art of relaxing. So how does relaxing throughout the day when you're not sleeping, how does that affect recovery, how does that affect mood and how will that affect performance ultimately?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think one of the core concepts here is that, to your body, stress is stress. So training is only one kind of stress that tires your body and requires resources and is sort of draining on the body. Psychological stress is also very taxing on the body. That's why, you know, when people feel stressed, we tend to think of them as sort of shaking, and you know we have this idea of like a vibrating, stressful person, right. Well, that's because it really is taxing on your body.
Speaker 2:And so the idea here is to sort of learn to really manage stress I don't say eliminate stress, because that's impossible, you know, most of us have stress in our lives but really learning how to manage that in a way where it's not creating extra load on your body, because stress can be very detrimental to recovery.
Speaker 2:And so the thing that I like to tell people is just make sure that every single day you have a period of time it doesn't have to be hours and hours, but it needs to be at least a half an hour, maybe a little more, where you're just there's no expectation of being productive, you're just relaxing, whether that's sitting on your porch watching the sunset, taking your dog for a walk and just unwinding, you know, shutting out the rest of the world, you know, kicking back with a good book, like maybe mine, you know it doesn't matter, but the idea is that you're just really relaxing and letting go a little bit and then that's a regular part of your life.
Speaker 2:I think is really important and helpful. I mean, we know the studies really do show that stress is detrimental. So figuring out a way to let go of that and that may feel different for you at different times in your life, during a really stressful period it may be that you also need to just cut back your training a little bit, maybe take an extra nap, something like that but really give your body the resources it needs and to understand that stress is a resource spender for your body and that it's detrimental.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, blank space meditation, cat nap, whatever you want to call it. And I think that we don't have time, nor my brain capacity, to understand what that does from a neurological level to the hormonal level, all the way down to the muscle physiology level. But we know that that stillness and relaxation does wonders. So it's like, cultivate it in your life, planet, if you need to just block it on your calendar, but do it and practice it, because I think, like if there's any boring, you know advice, it's sleep better and create stillness in in your life to relax. So final question, to you.
Speaker 1:Christy, and then we'll wrap this up. Since you wrote the book, are there any new updates or anything that like a realization that you would want to add if you could just amend the book right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know the biggest one is really that, recognizing that a lot of the concepts in the book don't just apply to athletes. I talked to a lot of people that are sort of like high performing, like CEOs, and people that are working really hard in their professional lives, and so much of this applies to them and particularly people who are traveling a lot. That's almost like a really hard training regimen, right, and so much of the advice in the book. I mean there's a lot of advice in the sleep chapter about figuring out sleep when you're traveling, and particularly when you're traveling to races and things like that and crossing time zones like how do you navigate that? Because we know that that's really detrimental but you can't avoid it, right, and you're going to this race in a different time zone and maybe you can't get a bunch of time off ahead of time. What can you do? And so I've got some advice on that and things like that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it turns out I've kind of recognized I kind of was joking with my agent that my next book will be in a recovery for people on book tour. You know authors on book tour because you know it is like you know different city. You know, after my book came out, I went on this big book tour and it was a little bit exhausting like that and I thought, well, I'm really putting these concepts to work. So I do think that it really extends beyond just sports, that it really extends beyond just sports.
Speaker 1:It absolutely does. And I've got a trip coming up to Spain where I'll be directing a women's team and like using the, like the sleep hacks in the, the, the recovery kind of modalities to like get myself on a sleep schedule and keep myself happy and sane during that time will be implemented.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, well, that's it. That's our show for today. Christy, thank you again so much for taking time out of your busy life. I know you've got stuff coming up immediately after this, so, um, I really appreciate you helping our listeners. Uh, cut through some of the noise and BS that's out there in the recovery space. And thank you personally for writing this book, because when my athletes have questions, I say get this book because it's so rich.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate it, it's my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Totally, totally, and I will say we'll put this in our show notes. But this is Christy's book. Big fan of, big fan of Christy, big fan of the book and Christy. I will now let you go on to your presentation.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Thank you, Ciao. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.
