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Injury Prevention > Recovery Stategies

Striking the right balance between training and recovery has a major influence on your fitness status, susceptability to injuries and playing performance. Neglecting this principle is detrimental to both fitness and skill.

Particularly at higher levels of competition, where the issue of recovery is more relevant, the competitive season continues to place huge demands on players who have to perform every seven days. In-season sessions that extend beyond 90 minutes raise the following issues:-

• Reduced intensity
• Decreased concentration
• Reduced enjoyment/increased boredom
• Increased injury risk
• Loss of leg speed and agility due to poor training surface

Recovery strategies may be used to facilitate optimum status for competition during several stages of the training plan and include:

• Cool down
• Regenerate
• Lifestyle
• Fluids & nutrition (please refer to the Fluids & Nutrition section)
• Recovery Status
• Periodisation

Cool Down
As soon as you have completed a session, the recovery process starts with a cool-down. The cool down is a vital part of the recovery process for several reasons:

• Blood flow back to the heart is inhibited if you suddenly stop moving - light exercise maintains this cycle of venous return and ensures that blood is distributed to other areas, such as your brain, instead of pooling in your legs.
• Stretching. Restoring normal range of movement is a proven injury prevention tactic and also promotes blood flow.
• Review the session. This is an ideal time to review the content of the session and get feedback.
• Cold bath or shower. A short spell in a cold bath or shower can help reduce inflammation, promote recovery and return the body temperature to normal. The rapid variation of vasoconstriction and vasodilatation will increase the removal of waste products and activate the blood flow to the muscles.

Regenerate
Particularly on the day following a game, players should perform a 'regen' session to promote recovery. This type of session promotes recovery by restoring energy, muscle tension, balance and range of motion. This is now common practice at professional clubs, and more so with international teams.

Lifestyle
Lifestyle areas for consideration in the recovery and performance equation include:

• Sleep
• Alcohol
• Stress

Sleeping is the period in which the biggest physical and psychological restoration takes place. The harder your training programme, the longer your sleep duration. Sleep facilitates several bodily changes; your muscles relax and repair while there is an increased protein production and the immune system takes full advantage. Highly trained players require 9-10 hours sleep and should be tucked away before 10.30pm!

Some players experience poor sleep the night before a game but rarely report that their performance was affected. It is generally the next day that tiredness manifests.

Alcohol reduces protein synthesis, the amount of certain vitamins and promotes dehydration. The worst case scenario is a binge drinking session following a game, with poor food intake and only a few hours sleep. Compounding the dehydration and energy sapping effects of a match with a high volume of alcohol and lack of sleep has a massive influence on the recovery process.

Be positive - don't think about Rugby League during your spare time and focus on confident not negative thoughts. Players and coaches suffer from varying degrees of stress depending on their personal circumstances and steps should be taken to monitor these levels via the intervention of a Sport Psychologist or a Counselling Scheme.

Recovery Status
Consider the items on the Recovery Status Questionnaire (above, right column) - your ratings are a reliable sign of your readiness to train. Other elements to consider include resting pulse and dynamic performance in jumps. A resting pulse 10 beats or more above normal may indicate a below optimum recovery status

Periodisation
Periodisation is the division of the training plan into phases or cycles with specific objectives. Conditioning for Rugby League is challenging because various fitness components must be developed and technical and tactical development must also be accommodated. Teams generally compete every 7 days for a period of more than 32 weeks, so correctly managing training overload by using periodization is crucial.

The most effective way to encourage physical adaptation is to focus during a training phase on specific elements of conditioning while also minimizing the loss of other elements. In the competitive season, for example, there are times when a general mix of training is beneficial. By dividing these phases into training blocks of three to six weeks, fitness components that complement each other can be emphasized. For example, training blocks that combine speed and strength drills or fuel mix conditioning and strength endurance work well, but speed and endurance training should not be combined because the level of general fatigue created by the endurance component does not support effective speed development.

The Rugby League year is split into four phases-active rest, off-season, preseason, and in-season-during which players can concentrate on various conditioning components and objectives. The Four Phases of the Rugby League Year

However, it must be stressed that the emphasis in training depends on the individual's conditioning profile and should progress from core stabilization and general fuel mix drills to power, speed, agility, and specific fuel mix conditioning.