#842 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientists Masterclass On Recovery & Stress Management

Don't ask what you can add; ask what which can subtract. Recovery is mostly about doing less, not about doing more.

The psychological vectors are real big in recovery and actually impact sport performance and body composition. If you're chronically stressed, if you're chronically pissed, if you've got a girlfriend you fight with all the time, it will make you less lean and less jacked. It will make you worse at your sport than you could have been.

It's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of maintenance of a machine. But it's not an analogy; I would call it a homology. It's actually the same thing. Humans are machines, period there's no analogy there.

You have the situation where you have recovery, which is the reinstatement of that baseline normal state that's ready to perform. And then you have fatigue, which is the disruption of that state. But where is that disruption coming from? The obvious answer is training, physical exertion, but it's not the only answer.

The third thing is the real big head fuck: Psychological vectors absolutely affect fatigue at the physical level.

It turns out that daily physical activity, contributes substantially to fatigue. And if it doesn't contribute to fatigue, as in raising it, it prevents the fatigue from otherwise, having been lowered much further by the other things you do in the day that recover, you: eat food, sleep, so on and so forth...