The Athlete's Guide to Recovery: Rest, Relax, & Restore for Peak Performance

by Sage Rountree

Overview

The first comprehensive, practical exploration of the art and science of athletic rest from a certified cycling, triathlon, and running coach.

If you’ve hit a wall in your training, maybe it’s because your body isn’t recovering enough from each workout to become stronger.

In The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery, Sage Rountree will guide you to full recovery and improved performance, revealing how to measure your fatigue and recovery, how much rest you need, and how to make the best use of recovery tools. Drawing on her own experience along with interviews with coaches, trainers, and elite athletes, Rountree details daily recovery techniques, demystifying common aids like ice baths, compression apparel, and supplements. She explains in detail how to employ restorative practices such as massage, meditation, and yoga. You will learn which methods work best and how and when they are most effective.

The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery explores:

• Periodization and overtraining
• Ways to measure fatigue and recovery including heart rate tests, heart rate variability, EPOC, and apps
• Stress reduction
• Sleep, napping, nutrition, hydration, and supplements
• Cold and heat like icing, ice baths, saunas, steam rooms, whirlpools, and heating pads
• Home remedies including compression wear, creams, and salts
• Technological aids like e-stim, ultrasound, Normatec
• Massage, self-massage, and foam rolling
• Restorative yoga
• Meditation and breathing

Then you can put these tools and techniques to practice using two comprehensive recovery plans for both short- and long-distance training. This invaluable resource will enable you to maintain that hard-to-find balance between rigorous training and rest so that you can feel great and compete at your highest level.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937716387
Publisher:	Ulysses Press
Publication date:	01/11/2024
Series:	The Athlete's Guide
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	298
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Sage Rountree is America's leading expert on yoga for athletes. She is a certified endurance sports coach as well as an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher with the Yoga Alliance. She is a featured instructor at Kripalu and offers yoga workshops for athletes and coaches around the country as well as at Carolina Yoga Company, a yoga studio she co-owns.

An accomplished competitor in running and triathlon, Sage has raced distances from sprint triathlon to Ironman ®, 400 meters to 40 miles, including the Boston Marathon and the 2008 Short-Course Age-Group World Championship in Vancouver, Canada, where she represented the U.S. as a member of Team USA.

Sage is a frequent contributor to Runner's World, Triathlete, Competitor, and Yoga Journal magazines and has contributed to USA Triathlon Life, VeloNews, Running Times, Inside Triathlon, and Endurance magazines. Sage is the author of The Athlete's Guide to Yoga, The Runner's Guide to Yoga, The Athlete's Pocket Guide to Yoga, and The Athlete's Guide to Recovery.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Defining and Measuring Recovery

1. Why Recovery Matters

2. Avoiding Overtraining

3. Qualitative Measurements of Recovery

4. Quantitative Measurements of Recovery

5. Recovery from Injury and Illness

Part 2: Recovery Techniques

6. Active Recovery

7. Stress Reduction

8. Sleep

9. Nutrition and Hydration

10. Supplements

11. Cold and Heat

12. Home Technological Aids

13. Other Technological Aids

14. Massage

15. Self-Massage

16. Restorative Yoga

17. Meditation and Breathing

Part 3: Recovery Protocols

18. Putting It Together

19. Recovery from Short-Distance Training and Racing

20. Recovery from Long-Distance Training and Racing

Editorial Reviews

This is the book every athlete should have in their library. Through excellent research and reporting plus insights from her own personal and professional experiences, Sage Rountree invites us to reimagine recovery as an essential part of training and racing—and gives us actionable, accessible tips on how to make it part of our routines.

Pam Moore

Athletes are a driven bunch and spend countless hours training to perfect their sport. All those hours count, but so too does the time invested in recovery, which is where the magic happens. In The Athlete's Guide to Recovery, Second Edition, Sage Rountree makes the case for why recovery is every bit as important as training. She also provides a guide on how to properly work recovery into your routine. Sage's essential second edition brings you all the latest research and recommendations to ensure you properly balance your training with recovery, all in the name of better performance and better health.

Amanda Loudin

In this 24/7, go-go world we live—and exercise—in, it’s crucial to be reminded of the importance of rest and recovery. With her deep well of wisdom as a coach, instructor, and athlete, Sage Rountree is the perfect person to guide us all on steps for putting recovery into action.

Sarah Bowen Shea

A must read! This book is an invaluable resource for athletes seeking cutting-edge recovery modalities to optimize performance.

Susan Kitchen

Sage Rountree has written the definitive guide to athletic recovery. There’s not an ounce of fluff in this important book. Every sentence has practical value for athletes seeking their full potential.

Matt Fitzgerald

I’m no athlete and haven’t been for a lot of years, but rest is still hard for me. To “do nothing” goes against my nature. Here Sage makes the case and gives strategies for doing just that. Happy training! And happy recovery to you!

Roy Williams

"Rountree helps you make the most of your down time, with methods both simple (massage, napping) and technical (computerized compression sleeves)." — Bicycling magazine
"An all-encompassing guide for how (and why) to make recovery an extension of your training…If there's a recovery tool on the mraket, it's probably explained in this book—think everything from compression socks to Epsom salts to NormaTec MVP boots." — Triathlete magazine
"The Athlete's Guide to Recovery stresses the oft-neglected key to a successful season of endurance sports—recovery…This invaluable resource will enable you to maintain that hard-to-find balance between rigorous training and rest so that you can feel great and compete at your highest capability." — USA Triathlon Life magazine
"The Athlete's Guide to Recovery is a truly essential resource for endurance athletes. Most competitive endurance athletes do not do enough for recovery and this book is the only comprehensive and credible resource for athletes who seek to address their imbalance." — Running.Competitor.com
"The Athlete's Guide to Recovery combines years of accumulated research, knowledge, and practice into a single volumn on how to rest right." — LAVA magazine
"Rountree does a brilliant job of discussing one of the most critical (and frequently neglected) aspects of performance…Easy to read and understand, The Athlete's Guide to Recovery is an indispensable resource for runners of all levels." — Canadian Running magazine
"Informative and easily understandable." — Athletics Weekly magazine
"A fast read [offering] good insight on how to avoid overtraining and how to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative data tracking to gauge [your] level of recovery." — TriMadness
"Sage Rountree takes much of the guesswork out of recovery and explains why it is so important. The book includes tips and recommended recovery times for various races. Read it guilt-free while resting by a pool or on a beach." — Salt Lake Tribune
"The Athlete's Guide to Recovery is the kind of book I wish I had when I was seriously competing in triathlons…It might have saved me from injuries and overtraining as well as improved my speed." — Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2024

Runner/athlete/yogi Roundtree's (Racing Wisely) interest in recovery as a modality of performance-boosting self-care began long before it became a wellness trend. This updated edition of her 2011 book integrates her historical knowledge, personal and professional practice, and recent research into an accessible, approachable guide designed to convince high-performance exercisers that recovery shouldn't be an afterthought; Rountree believes it must be incorporated into the training cycle with intentionality. Her charts will appeal to readers familiar with the periodization-style approach to training, and her examples of how recovery benefits elite athletes will inspire everyday fitness enthusiasts to think about how they might be able to expand their limits by viewing yoga, foam rolling, stretching, and sleep as integral to their training. VERDICT Perfect for athletes in need of a reminder that being quick with their recovery efforts isn't a quick fix. This impressive book shows how slowing down speeds up results in the gym, on the road, and beyond.—Emily Bowles

Library Journal