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How to Balance Exercise Intensity and Recovery for Better Fitness Gains


man recovering from boxing drill

Do you ever feel exhausted before even starting something physically taxing, like yardwork or a workout session? That heavy feeling in your body when you’re just warming up or lifting a bag of mulch can make the task seem twice as hard. You push through, only to feel worse the next day.


Several factors—sleep, stress, diet, and recent physical activity—impact your readiness for physical exertion. While exercise strengthens muscles, builds endurance, and improves overall fitness, it also taxes your body. To get stronger, you need to push your body just beyond its limits, a concept called the overload principle. By doing so, your body adapts, becoming more efficient at handling the increased demands.


The balance between progress and recovery

You can achieve these improvements by either increasing intensity or volume. Research from Peer Journal highlights that increasing exercise volume is just as effective as lifting heavier weights to promote muscle growth. However, too much volume or intensity without adequate recovery leads to fatigue and performance plateaus.


Your body’s response to physical exertion can fall into three categories:


  1. Functional overreaching: This is when you push your workouts harder for a short time, followed by adequate recovery. This boosts performance after your body repairs itself.

  2. Non-functional overreaching: When you push too hard and don’t recover enough, it leads to persistent fatigue, reducing performance. This is where I ended up while training for my first marathon, not improving despite following a structured program.

  3. Overtraining: The most severe state, where insufficient recovery leads to prolonged health and performance decline. This is not just about exercise—it’s also tied to stress, poor sleep, or major life changes, like becoming a new parent or managing a stressful job.


Overtraining isn’t exclusive to elite athletes. Anyone can experience it. Common signs include extreme fatigue, insomnia, lack of motivation, unplanned weight loss, irritability, and recurring soreness, as listed in Sports Health.


Do you need a break?

The concept of a deload week—reducing exercise intensity and volume for a week—has been widely used in fitness. After training hard for 3–5 weeks, you back off to allow recovery while maintaining performance.


However, recent research from Peer Journal questions the necessity of deload weeks. In a 9-week study of strength-trained men, the group that skipped a deload week made more strength gains than those who took the break, without a significant difference in muscle growth.


While this study was specific to strength training, the need for deloads may vary based on your experience level, the type of training you’re doing, and how long you’ve been training. In my experience, consistent progress can often be achieved without scheduled deloads by listening to your body and adjusting your workouts.


Tailor your exercise recovery strategies

One of the most important recovery strategies is autoregulation—adjusting your workout intensity based on how you feel each day. Instead of sticking rigidly to a plan, you can gauge your fatigue and performance, using metrics like Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) or Reps in Reserve (RIR). RPE measures how difficult a workout feels on a scale from 1 to 10, while RIR gauges how many more reps you could perform before failure.


For example, if you’re aiming for a challenging workout, you might stop when you have 2 reps in reserve. On lighter days, you might aim for 4–5 reps in reserve. These methods allow for flexibility, ensuring you’re not pushing too hard when your body needs recovery.


Balancing training intensity

A training strategy known as polarized training involves spending about 80% of your workouts at low-to-moderate intensity and 20% at high intensity. This balance helps build endurance without leading to excessive fatigue. This approach helps prevent burnout while still allowing you to push yourself at times.


On the recovery side, sleep is critical. According to the British Journal of Sports Medicine, sleep deprivation reduces cognitive function, reaction time, and physical performance, while also slowing recovery. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, with 9 or more indicating potential sleep debt or other health issues.


Recovery is also influenced by adequate nutrition, especially protein intake and caloric balance. Beyond this, a calming evening routine can help lower your heart rate and support a restorative environment for better recovery.


Listen to your body’s recovery signals

Finally, it’s essential to recognize when your body is struggling to recover. Constant fatigue, poor sleep, and performance plateaus are warning signs. If you track your metrics through a wearable, you might notice elevated heart rate, higher body temperature, or reduced heart rate variability—all signs you need more recovery time.


Balancing training and recovery is key to sustained progress and avoiding burnout. By adjusting your workouts based on how you feel, incorporating easier days, and ensuring adequate sleep and nutrition, you can improve your fitness without overtraining.


For a deeper dive, check out my Medium article on the topic (free article link)


References
  1. Plotkin D, Coleman M, Van Every D, Maldonado J, Oberlin D, Israetel M, Feather J, Alto A, Vigotsky AD, Schoenfeld BJ. Progressive overload without progressing load? The effects of load or repetition progression on muscular adaptations. PeerJ. 2022 Sep 30;10:e14142. doi: 10.7717/peerj.14142. PMID: 36199287; PMCID: PMC9528903.

  2. Kreher JB, Schwartz JB. Overtraining syndrome: a practical guide. Sports Health. 2012 Mar;4(2):128-38. doi: 10.1177/1941738111434406. PMID: 23016079; PMCID: PMC3435910.

  3. Bosch JA, Engeland CG, Cacioppo JT, Marucha PT. Depressive symptoms predict mucosal wound healing. Psychosom Med. 2007 Sep-Oct;69(7):597-605. doi: 10.1097/PSY.0b013e318148c682. Epub 2007 Aug 31. PMID: 17766687.

  4. Marucha PT, Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Favagehi M. Mucosal wound healing is impaired by examination stress. Psychosom Med. 1998 May-Jun;60(3):362-5. doi: 10.1097/00006842-199805000-00025. PMID: 9625226.

  5. Coleman M, Burke R, Augustin F, Piñero A, Maldonado J, Fisher JP, Israetel M, Androulakis Korakakis P, Swinton P, Oberlin D, Schoenfeld BJ. Gaining more from doing less? The effects of a one-week deload period during supervised resistance training on muscular adaptations. PeerJ. 2024 Jan 22;12:e16777. doi: 10.7717/peerj.16777. PMID: 38274324; PMCID: PMC10809978.

  6. Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, Bliwise DL, Buxton OM, Buysse D, Dinges DF, Gangwisch J, Grandner MA, Kushida C, Malhotra RK, Martin JL, Patel SR, Quan SF, Tasali E. Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: A Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep. 2015 Jun 1;38(6):843-4. doi: 10.5665/sleep.4716. PMID: 26039963; PMCID: PMC4434546.



 

 

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