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On today's episode, Understanding Your Recovery Pyramid, with Shona Halston. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life, but more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and- conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission, to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a fighter, and a fighter. former chronic injury sufferer and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. excited to bring you this episode today. Shona is a big guru, I'll call her, in Australia and around the world when it comes to recovery. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Behavioural and Health Sciences at ACU, Australian Catholic University. She has been involved in several webinars and interviews that I have paid attention to for a long time now. I am a big fan. And I usually don't get nervous when it comes to interviewing. I did at the start of my podcast career. Now I'm just excited. But when Shona came on, I did get a little bit, um, I was a little bit nervous at the start. I did fumble through her name. I said, um, Shona Holson instead of Halston, which, um, isn't a big deal. But then I actually fumbled, uh, the name of my podcast and the run starter podcast would be an interesting name. But I did fumble my way through that due to the nerves, but quickly calmed my senses, got into the rhythm of things, and we just went nuts with some valuable, valuable content. In one of the webinars that I attended, well now it's probably a couple of months ago, she talked about the recovery pyramid and really thought it was a fascinating topic, fascinating concept, and perfect for our recovery theme. So I hope you enjoy I have a big announcement before we do our interview we have a run smarter app now which has several things it has my blogs it has my online courses it has my podcast episodes all the podcast episodes are housed in neat sort of categories for you to. for you to kind of navigate through and find what's most relevant for you. We're approaching a hundred episodes now. And I think, I don't know how many blogs I've got, maybe 150. There's a lot of content there and it's very hard for someone just to discover the podcast and say, where do I start? What do I look through? And so this is perfect. You download the Run Smarter app, just search Run Smarter app wherever. Well, it's now on Android, had a couple of issues with Android, but as of this morning, it is now good to go. It is on iOS and it's also available as a website, which I would put up, and that's where, through the website, is where you can also apply to become a patron. And yeah, so you've got the... pretty much all the content for you to become a smarter runner. It's the, the podcast, it's the app form of the podcast with, with a lot more visual components, if you need it, you can read, you can watch, you can listen. And I do have a lot of content and the fact that it's housed into neat little categories makes a better experience. I hope it's a better experience for you. And yeah, without further ado. Let's bring on Dr. Shona Halston, associate professor Shona Halston. Thank you very much for joining the run starters, the run smarter podcast. Thanks Brody. Thanks for the invitation. You're very welcome. I will start by saying that later in, um, I'm preparing for an interview with, um, Christie Ashwandan and she is the author of good to go. I was reading her book and a lot of the papers and a lot of the signs that she references. is a lot of your work. And I'm like, oh, thank God I'm actually interviewing Shona as well. And I had an interview with Izzy Smith yesterday, actually. And she was like, if you have a topic around recovery, you need to interview Shona. And I'm like, I'm interviewing her tomorrow. This is awesome. So you're very highly regarded and around the world. So I'm pumped to have you on today. Can we just start off with your... a brief summary of your background and the athletes you've been working with. And yeah, let's dive in that way. Yeah, so probably most relevant, I did my PhD a number of years ago. 2002, I finished and I did that in Birmingham, in the UK, with Professor Asker Uckendrop, who might be familiar to a few people is he's a bit of an expert. lot of an expert in the nutrition space. And so that research was in over training. So I was really interested in, you know, fatigue and can you train too much and, and then a job came up, it was advertised at the Institute of Sport, and it was in fatigue and recovery. And I was like, that sounds fantastic. And was fortunate enough to get that job and spent about 16 years at the Institute, which was, you know, my role was sort of servicing, so working directly with athletes, doing some research, of course. And as well as part of that, I went to three Olympics to head up the Australian Olympic team's recovery area. So that was awesome. And then now I've moved on into research. Predominantly, I'm an Australian Catholic University, so I do a lot of sleep research and some recovery research, but they're great in terms of allowing me to still do some... work with the lead athletes and the last couple of years I've worked with the US Women's National Team and the lead up to the World Cup so that was awesome. They're a great team to work with and yeah just different sports and different some NFL teams and NBA teams in the past as well as you know some AFL, NRL, rugby union as well over the last couple of years so. Yeah, which is great because the research is interesting and I find that fascinating to get, we want to understand how things work and so we can make things better but it's the translation into practice and having people actually using these techniques and these strategies, that's the really interesting stuff for me. Unreal and it sounds like you've worked with so many super elites and I did listen to your webinar a couple of weeks ago and when... You're going through the webinar. I'm just like, she's worked with so many people and like the, the level is this intense, however, like a lot of the listeners, uh, they'll listen to the podcast, they are recreational runners. However, they're training for marathons and they're doing ultras as well. And so, uh, recovery should be super, super important for a lot of them. And I wanted to start by discussing, like within that webinar, you discussed the recovery pyramid. And, uh, I guess we can start by just describing just like a brief summary of what that the recovery period actually is, and then we can delve a bit deeper into certain aspects of it as well. Yeah. And I think you know, as you say, you know, the recreational athlete, I think, you know, there's times when I think that they need more recovery than, you know, than some of our elite athletes. And because people have very different challenges when you're trying to work. You don't have that recovery time during the day. Most people kind of take a nap when they want. So there's a lot of challenges, I think, around being a recreational athlete and just balancing everything. And I think, you know, recovery is obviously, you know, one of those things that can really help with that. balance in terms of training work, etc. So I think, you know, the pyramid, even though, you know, I originally designed it with work with, you know, with elite athletes, there's many of those things and the principles apply to the recreational athletes. So the, you know, the idea around the pyramid is that the base of the pyramid is the most important things and the things you need to really get right before you start adding. you know, extra strategies to the top of the pyramid. So, you know, we kind of call that like the icing on the cake. You know, you got to bake the cake properly first and then you put the icing and then you put sprinkles. So, you know, the base of that pyramid for me, the most important thing, and, you know, maybe I'm biased. Dieticians might argue that it's nutrition. I sort of believe that it's sleep, but I feel that, you know, sleep and mental recovery and some downtime is the base of the pyramid. Part of the reason why I think that's important is because the length of time that we actually spend asleep. So, you know, we're supposed to spend a third of our lives asleep. So that means that it's something that's very important. And so for me, that's the base of the pyramid. Next up, we'll do look at things like nutrition. And we know, obviously, that nutrition is really important. And from a recovery perspective and a fatigue perspective, we want to make sure that getting adequate nutrition and hydration. And then you probably move on to some of the other maybe more optional strategies or some things that obviously the elites put in but I think can be important for the recreational athlete in terms of just getting some extra recovery where they need it. So things like compression garments, massage if you can access it and water immersion. They're probably the next three that I would pay attention to but for me really it's around you know those things are all good you know compression massage you know ice baths or water immersion or whatever you might be able to do. But there's no point really in doing those unless you've nailed the bottom of the pyramid. So it's all well and good to wear compression garments for 60 minutes. But if you're not sleeping and you're not eating, it's probably not going to do you do you much benefit. So yeah, for me, I think get that bottom of that pyramid right. And if that's all you can do as a recreational athlete who's really busy, if that's all you can do is prioritize getting a half hour and hour exercise, sorry, half an hour extra sleep. then that's something that I would prioritize over, you know, say compression garments or get jumping into an ice bath or something like that. Okay. I think it is clear that people do get that message. I know a lot of people head for the top of the pyramid, which is all like the little fads, which we'll discuss in a second without getting the base right. And we will have, we will be discussing sleep and discuss discussing nutrition on other episodes of this recovery month. So, I wanted to delve into other topics, but before we do, you do have this base pyramid as sleep and also downtime, which I think is really important to highlight as well. And someone might not be sleeping too well. Maybe it's like out of their control. Maybe they've got like a, um, waking baby or, you know, maybe stress might be keeping them up. Can you just highlight the importance of downtime as well as sleep and separating the two? Yeah. So I sort of use downtime as a bit of a word that description for something that most people kind of understand. But I guess the more technical term would be meant recovering mentally. So because what we are now starting to understand is that people can get very mentally fatigued and that's different from being physically fatigued. And so what we want to do is try to get to try to reduce some of that mental fatigue. And that can come from being stressed and being super busy at work, can be caused by lots of things. In athletes, often what we see is, we see that they're physically kind of recovered okay, but mentally they're really drained. And that might be from a long season, a lot of travel, a lot of stress, whatever it might be. So for us that downtime was really relating to just having some time without there's no physical exercise, you may not be sleeping but you're just resting. And I think what happens a lot, especially in today's society, is we are so connected, whether that's, you know, social media, phones, you know, Netflix, you know, whatever it might be, we've got lots of stimulation, we've got lots of connections, and downtime, you know, for some it might be just watching, you know, something mindless on the TV, but it's just that period of time where you can sort of be a little bit distracted from the world, a stress-free period, a relaxing period, because obviously we know the brain and the body are so well connected, and we tend to spend all our time thinking about recovering the body, but we also need to think about recovering in the brain and making sure that we're fresh, as we can be from a mental perspective. So that's where this kind of downtime. And for some people it might be meditation, it might be relaxation, it might be, you know, whatever. it is that helps people relax and kind of switch off a little bit. It's nice to hear the same advice come from different professionals as well. And when I spoke to Izzy Smith yesterday, she was talking about the hormones within the body and realizing that physical stress and psychological stress, the same hormones are released. And almost like the body doesn't really know the difference when it comes to recovery, you're still having those same hormones that cortisol nor adrenaline. circulating through the body. And when you're, she explains like having this stress cup, you want to recover from the stress, but the physical stress and the psychological emotional stress kind of fills up that same cup. So very good. Being very mindful, relaxing, and kind of just unwinding a lot in a way is very good for recovery. Yes. Yeah. And I think, you know, people just think, you know, if you're not busy, you're lazy or, you know, in these, you know, in modern society, we've got so much on, we're doing so much, but just to take, even if it's half an hour for yourself, I think that's really important. Okay, so we have the importance of sleep and downtime. We have the importance of nutrition. We're gonna realize the importance of those, but skip them at the same time. And I wanna dive into water immersion and just talk about exactly what that is and what the benefits are with water immersion. Yeah, so we typically think of about four different types of water immersion. So we have cold water, which is your typical, what we think of as an ice bath, hot water, which we think of as like a spa bath. We have contrast, which is where you alternate between hot and the cold. And then you have kind of pool recovery or beach recovery, where you're sort of more active in a sort of neutral type water temperature. So one of the interesting things, you know, dating back, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years is that we, people used to use water hydrotherapy as a treatment for lots of different illnesses. But then of course what happens is, you know, we created, you know, people invented medications and we sort of moved away from hydrotherapy. But water was really used as a treatment for lots of things. So some of the mechanisms around how these water strategies work is obviously there's a temperature effect. And so cooling the body down. especially in warm conditions can be really helpful to speed up the recovery process. And we know there's a hydrostatic pressure effect of being in water. So the simplest way that I usually describe it is if you're wearing compression garments, the pressure is measured in the same way that you measure blood pressure in terms of the units. So it's millimeters of mercury. So compression garments are about 20 millimeters of mercury pressure at the ankle. If you're six foot tall and you're standing in water, that's about 150 millimeters of mercury pressure at the ankle. So when you're in water, there's a lot of hydrostatic pressure. And what that does is it moves the fluid around. Often why you need to go to the bathroom when you're hopping water, because it has a powerful effect on the kidneys. But essentially you've got a combination of these temperature and hydrostatic pressure effects that can be useful for blood flow, you know, redistributing blood flow for cooling the body down, et cetera. So they're kind of the two main mechanisms, but also, I mean, you know, I live in Queensland, grew up in Queensland and you know, you go for, you do some exercise outside and you go for a run and you know, if you can, you're hot and it's uncomfortable. If you can get in a pool or you can get in a beach, most people know it's a, you know, it's a pretty nice thing. It feels nice. So that cool, the body doesn't like being hot. in terms of having really high core temperatures. So cooling the body down just feels nice. So there's also some interesting research and some theories around water immersion, especially the cold water that it can actually, it does change some hormones and some neurotransmitters in the brain, especially in the feel-good areas of the brain. So I think there's a whole other area of... know, how it helps you feel and reducing soreness and those kinds of things as well. Okay, right. There's a few things to unpack there. If we're talking about trying to cool down the body and aiding that recovery, yes, you say it feels nice. If we're talking about circulating like blood circulation does cooling the body down help with circulation and removing a lot of that, the fluid? Yeah. So what we we do know is that when you hop in cold water in particular, what happens is the blood flow goes to the core to protect the vital organs. So obviously you wanna protect your heart and lungs and you know, all the important bits. So that's why your hands and feet get really cold, right? Cause all the blood's going to the core. So sometimes when you're actually in say an ice bath and when we measure people's core temperature, the core temperature doesn't often change that much when they're in the bath. because they're only in there for usually less than 15, 20 minutes. But what happens is when you get out of that bath, of course, all the blood flow goes back to your hands and feet. And so that's when you get this shift in temperature, your core temperature lowers. And you also, I get this shift in blood flow. And so that in itself can obviously help in terms of removing metabolic waste products, et cetera. We know that moving from hot to cold. So obviously you're getting really powerful shifts there from again, being in cold water, having the blood flow be, you know, directed to the core to keep you warm in the cold and then you hop in the hot. And you know, people often get pins and needles and funny sensations in the periphery when they do that because it's such a shock. But yeah, it's that blood flow change that's happening when you go from the hot to cold as well. Okay. And for active recovery, like beach and pool stuff, when you're moving as well as getting the benefits of water immersion, does temperature matter? Yeah, look, it is an interesting question because if you think of your skin temperature normally about 34 degrees, most of the time, most water that you get in is gonna be colder than that. So you'll eventually kind of cool down to some extent. But for me, the benefits of you know, jumping in a pool or getting down to the beach is more about being a bit more active, stretching, working through some soreness. So that's why you do see a lot of the, you know, the professional team sport athletes, you know, the AFL guys down at the beach the following day. So they're starting to work, you know, they're sore, they're beaten up, they're starting to do some of that more active work and being in a water and being weight, body weight supported. So you don't have impact with the ground because you're supported. That can be a really nice, more passive way of helping you, you know, you could go for a run, you know, and that would obviously get you moving again. But, you know, if you do that in water and your body weight's a bit more supported and there's less chance of obviously doing damage and, you know, adding any more muscle damage to it. So the, what the, you know, sometimes you look and you think, what are these crazy guys doing in a pool or down the beach? But, you know, there's... there's a bit of evidence there to suggest that it's a nice way of moving through the soreness. You know, you don't, you can imagine if you've, you know, been tackled and you know, you've been running, you know, 10 to 15 Ks in a game and then you just sit for, you know, the next day, you know, you can imagine you're going to be pretty sore. So doing some of that movement in water is a, is a nice, um, a nice approach. And for runners who want like some practical numbers and things to focus on. The amount of time that you're in the water or the amount of time that you're doing this act of recovery, does that matter as well? Yeah in terms of active recovery, like if you're at a pool or a beach, it's the timings probably, you know, you probably want to go for about half an hour to really make sure that you're getting a full body stretch and doing some, you know, doing some being relatively active without... pushing yourself too hard because it's recovery. I think 20 to 30 minutes is probably a reasonable time frame if you're going to be in the beach or the pool. Pools are obviously much easier in terms of, you've got a flat ground at the bottom, you don't have waves to deal with, you can sort of do a more structured session. But of course, if you can get to the beach, what a great place if you're fortunate enough to be able to get in and... and do some active work in the beach. It just can be a little bit more challenging to do things, you know, in a proper strict way when you're down the beach. Okay. And when it comes to like the, well, I guess we can move on because that was a very good practical answer. If we're talking about moving higher up in the pyramid, we had water immersion as kind of like the third level, then we moved up to compression, active recovery and stretching. Can we dive into compression and are we talking like the, the leggings, like skins that you can buy? Are we talking more medical grade, higher level compressions? And what is that achieving? Yeah. So there's probably three different areas when we say compression, what we really mean. So you're right. There's a medical grade compression. There's compression garments. So clothing. Um, so your tights typically are the most common, and then you have pneumatic. compression, which is like Normatec or recovery pump, or the devices where you put the legs on and you've plugged them in and they get very high amounts of pressure in those. So when it comes to say the first level of compression, which is medical grade, there's typically the socks that we see. And they're the sorts of things that we more recommend for flying. And so obviously not happening so much now in the COVID world, but. In terms of long haul travel, the goal is we want to prevent deep vein thrombosis. We want to prevent risks of any clots. And so the medical grade compression, they have the foot in it. We know that they're not going to cut off circulation at the ankle, like some types can do. They're designed with the right amount of pressure in them to optimize blood flow. So when I'm dealing with athletes and we're talking travel, and it's the same for recreational athletes, it's the same for the general public. general public, if you're traveling and you want to minimize your risk of deep vein thrombosis, compression socks from a medical perspective are your go-tos. When it comes to general recovery, compression garments, so, you know, two times you those kinds of companies, there's lots out there now, they're recommended, you know, we sort of recommend to wear them for about 60 minutes after you've exercised. What we know from the science, and it's actually a fairly large amount of research out there, what we know is, and the research is really variable, so it's super hard to come up with good, easy solutions and practical recommendations, but we know they definitely help in terms of reducing soreness. So there's a really strong perceptual effect. We've got some evidence that they can help you with repeat performance. So they potentially help from a blood flow recovery point of view, if you've got to perform again or train again within half an hour. And there's some evidence around that compression garments decrease that muscle oscillation or muscle wobble. So we did a study at the Institute where we set up Vikons and fancy cameras, and we looked at tiny movements in the muscle when people were running and jumping. And as you can imagine, the compression garments keep the muscle really tight. So there's not as much movement. And maybe that could lead to less soreness. We don't really know what the ramifications are just yet. So there's a few ways in terms of compression garments working, but the most common one is around blood flow. And especially if you're standing for long periods of time, you wanna make sure in the recovery period, you wanna make sure that you're getting that blood flow back from the... Um, extremities. Okay. So if someone goes for a run, let's just say they've the training for a marathon. They do their weekend long run and they have to spend the rest of the day on their feet, moving around after that long run. So I guess that's kind of staying active. Would you recommend them wear some like garments to aid with blood flow during the rest of the day? If they're standing for long periods, if that's part of people's work, I think they can definitely help. I think one of the things we have to consider though, is that they can, you know, compression tights can be one, they're warm. They can make you, you know, high temperature. So that, you know, if you have to wear them under a long pair of pants or something, then it's probably, you know, can get, be too warm for some people. And they can get uncomfortable if you're wearing them from a long, for a long period of time, because... The recommendation is when you go into a shop to buy, you're going to Rebel Sport, you want to buy a self in two times U gear, you put on the smallest pair that you can physically get into. It's like when women buy jeans, right? Get into the smallest pair you can get into and they'll give a little bit, right? So you just, if you get them on, they're good. And so what happens then, however, is that they can be a little bit uncomfortable. So if you could, if someone's gone out for a hard run, And they know they're probably going to have a bit of soreness the next day. Cause that's just, you know, you know, that that's probably going to happen. If you could wear some compression tights for about an hour afterwards, that's probably going to be, um, be beneficial in terms of just that soreness that builds up. Yeah. Great. I wanted to pick your brain a little bit around stretching and massage because I have done episodes in the past around stretching and I have had massage therapists on the past in the past, talking about these sorts of things. And. I wanted to kind of let you know where I'm at with these topics. And I'd love your input in terms of if you want to add anything or tell me I'm wrong or something, but the stuff I have researched regarding stretching and recovery is that it doesn't do a whole lot to help with delayed onset muscle soreness or to actual help the physical recovery. I do highly recommend that if it feels good for people, they definitely do it. So if it feels good to unwind, if it feels good for the muscles and similar to massage, there's not a lot of evidence that it helps circulation, like blood circulation in the body. It doesn't do a whole lot for, well, we don't know that it does a lot for. Like releasing, you're not really releasing knots or you're not really doing much physical to the muscle, but where the benefits do really come in. And I think the. benefits with stretching as well is the psychological benefits of unwinding of, you know, mentally settling down the feeling that you are drawing your attention towards recovery. Like these kind of aspects can have real true benefits towards recovery. Let's start with stretching. What, where are you at with restretching with stretching when it comes to recovery for the muscles? Have I outspoken? Do you disagree? Do you agree where we are? No, no, look, I agree. And it's one of the really interesting areas, because it's something that everyone does, right? You know, in terms of, you know, everyone just, most people finish, have a bit of a stretch. Now, the this you exactly right, the science just doesn't really support stretching from a recovery, purely recovery perspective, obviously, if you want to increase range of motion, or, you know, anything like that, or you want to warm up for, you know, if you're a gymnast, and you want to warm up, right, you get a stretch. But in terms of pure recovery and the benefits there in terms of performance and recovery in the muscle. It's more that it hasn't been researched much. The evidence, the research that has been done, you're exactly right, suggests that there's probably not a lot of benefits. But I certainly know there's a lot of athletes who feel like stretching in the recovery period does help them, whether it's psychological or not, but it can help them, especially if they feel like they've always got, it's nice, feels like, if they stretch their glutes, then they're less stiff and sore there the next day. If they stretch their hamstrings, they might be a little less sore the next day. So there's certainly a large number of athletes out there that feel like, and we don't have this in the science, but they feel like stretching maybe of benefit to soreness. especially those who may have areas of tightness or weakness or whatever it might be. So, but yeah, from a pure, you should stretch to enhance your recovery. So, you know, we think of recovery as your ability to back up. If you're, if you want to do a run one day and a run the next day in terms of performance, there's no reason why you do, you stretch. But maybe if you're someone who finds that they get tight or areas of soreness or whatever it might be, and it just makes you feel better. then it certainly wouldn't be something where stretching is sort of harmless, sorry, harmful. But it's, yeah, there's the science is not very strong in that area. So yes, I do agree with you on that one. Okay. I do think that, you know, muscles get sore and let's just say you've had a hard running session and the next day your hamstrings do get sore, your glutes do get sore. It almost creates a perception like they are tight because when It gets, it feels sore when you stretch. Yeah. Therefore it must be tight. Therefore I need to stretch. Um, and it feels good. Everyone's experienced it when they have these muscle soreness. I know if I do chest press at the gym and my pecs get really sore, I stretch all day just because I just want to feel something, I want to feel some sort of relief through that area. So I, I agree that definitely there's the, the feeling that it is doing something. And I highly recommend people do it if they feel like they're, um, if they feel like they are getting some benefit. But again, the topic around this pyramid, we wanna make sure that we're ticking the boxes of all the other recovery, the high end recovery stuff. And I guess not convincing ourselves of actually like the power that it has. How about massage? Can we dive into that a little bit? Yeah, and again, totally agree with you in terms of the... most of the research, you know, everyone said, you know, it was all about clearing lactate and getting the blood flow. We know that doesn't happen. Plus we also know if you want to clear lactate and you want to increase your blood flow, do an active recovery, do a low intensity warm down, that's going to clear lactate pretty quick. The other thing is the body's pretty good at clearing lactate itself without doing anything. So when we have people talk about recovery strategies to enhance lactate clearance, for most people, it's not important. because most people aren't performing again within 30 minutes or an hour. So from a massage perspective exactly, it's not gonna really influence your blood flow at all. There is something about, there's definitely strong psychological benefits and not just in sport, massage in general. There's some evidence around the release of some... some nice hormones that make you feel good, the power of touch, all that kind of stuff. And there is some good science. It's not woo-woo in that area. There's actually some good science, but in terms of increasing blood flow, very little information. And when it comes to, there was a systematic review that came out a couple of years ago where they analyzed all the research and basically found that from a performance perspective, there's really nothing there unless you're performing again within 10 minutes. So the massage was really not supported as a pure recovery strategy. Having said that though, there's some interesting research out of a guy called Thomas Best's lab and he does some really interesting, he started off doing some animal model work, but also does some human work and looking at vibration, but also potentially massage in terms of muscle recovery and healing from damaged muscles. And that's a bit of a stretch at the moment, but there's some really interesting stuff coming out there. So it's a bit of a watch this space, I think, but I think massage, gosh, I'd have one once a week if I could write. So it does feel good. And so as we say, we like people to have some downtime and some find some me time. And one of the things I love about massages is for most people. you don't take your phone with you. So it is that real time where you're, you know, where you're, uh, you're, you're not, uh, you're not staring at the staring at your screen for an hour or so. I guess, uh, you can say that massage is, can be a substitute for your downtime. Like we talked at the start, like the downtime is at the very base of the pyramid. That's what we want to care about the most. So if you're using massage as a tool for downtime, then you're utilizing it the best way possible. Yeah. Exactly, and I get asked a lot about flotation tanks. So if anyone doesn't know what they are, they're just like a big tank full of water, skin temperature water, it's dark, it's got lots of salt in it, so you float. So it's really this, you know, sensory deprivation. So, and it's really relaxing. Once you get used to it, it's a bit of a weird, you know, it feels weird when you first do it, but it's really relaxing. It's warm, it's quiet, you're in water. And... you know, there's a little bit of science about, you know, how it works. And certainly for yes, for relaxation, not much in athletes. But the thing I love about it is you definitely cannot take your phone in there. Like if you drop your phone in that salty water, it is not coming back. And so people and athletes often sleep in there. And part of the reason they sleep is because they sleep deprived and they're super relaxed and they're not on their phone. And so. when you got to think obviously about as you were saying with massage, there may be other ways that these things are adding to our recovery and floating in a float tank for 45 minutes to an hour might be a really good way of just having your downtime. Not super practical for everyone and expensive but for athletes I'm like yeah let's not think about you know what's what it's doing to blood flow and what it's doing to muscle recovery let's just think about here's an hour that they not bombarded with a stack of information. Yeah, great. Let's go through some listener Q&A. We had Rusty submit his question. He asks, what are some recommendations for active recovery routines after a long run? And I'm happy if you repeat some of what we've just discussed. If you have another answer, then we'll go through that. Yeah, so I guess it depends on what you've got access to. You know, for some people, active recovery might just be walking, you know, something low intensity. It might be, you know, getting on a stationary bike. You know, some people don't like stationary bikes because you're sort of in a sitting position, you know, hip flexors and all that stuff. But, you know, a stationary bike is, you know, obviously very low impact getting in the pool, getting in the beach or something like that. So anything that's low intensity. the more sort of off legs if possible can be good, but you just wanna get a little bit of that sort of blood flowing and a little bit of movement, but you don't wanna add any more fatigue or use any more fuel than you really need to. And just as a bit of a sidebar, if anyone who's ever worked with swimmers or even sees people swim competitions. they do active recoveries and warm-ups. I mean, warm-up's one thing, but their active recovery, their swim down. You know, when you add up how much they do if they're racing two or three times a day over five or six days, I mean, they're using a lot of fuel. And, you know, how much extra fatigue are they adding? So my things around an active recovery is just do something short, something that is, you know, low intensity, where you feel like you've got your breath back, especially if you've had a hard session. Um, and it just helps you sort of wind down from the, from the session. Okay. And on say non-running days where you're like, okay, today is a rest day, but they still want to stay active. Is there a way to gauge how long they should be training for or at what tentative they should be training at? Yeah, look, that's really difficult. It's completely dependent on, you know, how fit someone is, how much training they're actually doing. what type of exercise or type of training they're doing. And look, I think the thing that I think about is, and it's sort of related to my last response is, easy days are supposed to be easy days. And so making sure that, they're low intensity, you're not doing too much, you're just doing a little bit just to feel good and be out there moving. And I think one thing that people can do is And I know a lot of recreational runners tend to, because to trying to get in there, we try to get a routine and a pattern, tend to do some similar sessions, not all the time, but Wednesday might be the same session or something like that. And so what I like to do is just to sort of get people to think about, this is what I did on my off day or my rest day on my easy day. And this is how I felt the next day. And if you kind of, if the next day you think, oh, I don't feel so good, I'm a bit flattered, I'm actually a little bit sore from what I did, maybe you did a bit too much. And so I think it's really just looking back and seeing what you did and being cognizant and thinking about how you feel the next day. And really that's what recovery is. It's how do you, it's very difficult to measure how recovered you are, if not impossible. So what we do is we look and we go, okay, how did we back up from something? And if you're finding that you're a little bit fatigued or you're a bit flat, then maybe you've done too much on your easy days. And one thing, interesting studies, there's a couple of studies like this that have come out where they're people have planned hard days and have planned easy days. And the hard days are never as hard as they're planned. And the easy days are never as easy, they're always harder. So there's tends to be this, we don't go as hard as we should, as we plan on our hard days and we go a little bit harder on our easy days. So that is a bit of a trend that we see is people doing more than they probably should on their, on their easy days. Yeah. I think I've spoken to a lot of running coaches that talk about this gray zone and you're never fully, if you hit that gray zone where you're training too hard or you're working at too hard of an intensity during your recovery days, you can never fully benefit. the days where it's meant to be hard because you haven't recovered or you're not feeling as fresh. And so you're just destined to stay within this, this gray zone. I think that's a trick and a trap that a lot of runners get into. Yeah, I completely agree. And it's, it's one of the hardest things to do is to, you know, have, you know, as I said, really my background was over training. And so what happens when people get know, they're struggling with training or they're feeling tired, they think, Oh, I'm unfit or I've detrained. So I'm going to train a little bit harder. Right. That's when they get into a world of hurt. When what you really do is people need to understand that we make the improvements, we get better in terms of adapting to our training during rest. We don't, you know, we need the exercise, but we need the recovery to match it because that's where the muscles recover and the hormones, the good hormones are released and the repair and the regeneration. And if we don't give ourselves that opportunity to adequately recover, um, then we're probably not going to get the improvements in our performances and our ability to train that we should. Another message that's turned up multiple times in this theme. So fantastic. And it carries me over to Paul's question. He asks is, is complete rest or a short slow run better for an older runner after a day of a long run? What should they choose? Yeah, look, and again, it's very, very difficult to say cause it is based on, you know, how often you're training during the week. And, um, but I think what. you know, my philosophy is that rest is not a bad thing. And so if you are, you know, someone is an older runner and perhaps they're a little bit more prone to injury, then potentially I think there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a rest day. And I think we need to encourage people to take more rest days. And as you say, it may, you know, this may help them be able to do a much better session the next day if they've actually had a proper. a proper day off. So look, but I do know some people who do just like to get out and do something and it's good for their brain more than anything else, um, rather than not exercising at all, but low intensity or a day off, um, there's certainly, certainly nothing wrong with that. And I just think people should listen to their body and see how they pull up and see how they recover and see how, what their quality of effort is the next day. You know, maybe you can train much, much better, um, the following day, if you have a good rest day. I think that's a good point because I do know as runners do get older, they need to, they don't bounce back as quick from running sessions. And so maybe it's worth recalibrating or at least doing a trial and error. Like doing a complete rest day rather than your usual, just like recovery run to see if you do feel better. And I can speak for this as well. The last couple of months, I usually work out most days. I'll, I won't run every day, but I'll do a gym session every like second day or something. And I've decided to combine some of those workouts. I'll do a run and then I'll do a gym session on in one day and then use that second day for complete rest. And I've noticed this within myself of having more complete rest days that. My legs are feeling fresher for my longer runs and for my harder runs. And so that's a routine that I've tried and I'm going to stick to, because I feel a lot better from it. Whereas someone's. someone's experience might be completely different, but at least you've tried the two things, you've tried the two methods and see how you feel. Yeah and you know even the most elite of elite athletes will likely have at least one day off a week, so you know it's not like having a day off is altogether a bad thing, but you're exactly right having you know the time between your last training session and the next one. That's when the magic happens, right? So some people may need a little bit longer than others to recover. And yes, I definitely know as I age, it is not as easy to bounce back in short periods of time. I wasn't going to ask this question, but since we were on the topic of like training in the heat earlier in the episode, I thought I'd just chuck this in. So Jacinta asks, what is the best way to recover running after runs in hot or humid conditions. Let's just say for an example, if you're training for a marathon up in Queensland or in summer, and you have to do your weekend long run, what would that recovery look like? Yeah, I'd target two things. Definitely your hydration. And so, you know, that's a, it's a no brainer and non-negotiable. So getting the fluids back in because you've probably lost a bit. And then the second one would be finding ways to cool the body down. And there's lots of different options for that. It could just be a cold shower. Now cold shower doesn't work as well as an ice bath. Doesn't cool you down as much and as quick, but a cold shower will cool you down. When we're, you know, sometimes, you know, working with high level athletes, you know, you could be in, you know, we've been in Beijing, we've been in Rio and you've got no equipment but you've got, okay, you've got a nice... an ice towel and you've got a frozen drink and you could just cover the body in the frozen towel, the icy towel to cool your temperature. So finding ways in that practical world to cool yourself down. Is it a bath? Is it a shower? Is it the beach? Is it an ice towel? Because as I was saying earlier, the body, having very, very high core body temperatures is... is not good, obviously. It's something that the body fights. So if you're running with a high core temperature, what happens is you either slow down or you stop when you get to a critical point. And so what we want to do when we recover, especially when we're in warm conditions, is to cool that body very quickly so then you can start the rest of the recovery process. So a combination of drinking something, you know, something good for your hydration, something cold, so you're cooling the core through your drink, um, and then cooling your periphery. So cooling the skin, weather, as I said, shower, bath, whatever you can do that, that cools you down. And generally speaking, the faster you do that, the faster you'll recover. And the faster they'll actually feel good. Cause yeah, exercising in really hot conditions for most people. Um, unless you're really mad about it. Um, most people don't like it. Yeah. I think it's worth mentioning as well when you talked about hydration. That comes under the blanket of nutrition in our recovery pyramid as well. So we want to know the importance of hydration. That's like the second tier with the pyramid. That's the only thing that's better than that is sleep and downtime. So very good point. Um, anything else I need to ask? Oh yeah. When it comes to cooling yourself down in the webinar, you did mention if you're doing ice baths or if you're doing just cold water, there's a certain temperature, which helps still age recovery. But. it's not cold enough that you're wanting to get out after 10 seconds, what's that ideal temperature? Yeah, and again, it's very subjective. So some people like cold better than others, but generally speaking, as I was saying earlier, anything below your skin temperature will cool you down. So we've done some research using 15 degree water, which is a bit uncomfortable, but we've also done research with 20 degree water temperature. And that is... 20 degrees is more tolerable for most people, and it just means that you stay in a bit longer. So for example, ice baths, we recommend, when you've built up to it, about 10 to 15 minutes in 10 to 15 degrees, like that's pretty up there in terms of being a pretty solid cold session. But if your water temperature is more like 20 to 25 degrees, you might just need to stay in there for about 20 minutes to get the benefits. So you'll still get the hydrostatic pressure benefits, but the cooling is not as much. So it doesn't mean, you know, you see early days when we started looking at ice baths, you'd see all these pictures of people in a bath and it's just ice. Like that's, that's why you don't, that's not necessary. Like people think of ice baths as ice and that's not the case. You know, a good temperature of water is nothing near frozen. It's something more like 15. 15 degrees. And even as I said, up to 2025 is still going to do the job, just staying a bit longer. Yeah, good point. It's good to highlight that because when it comes to ice baths, that's what we call them. We call them ice baths. And so people think there's just all ice. So yes, very good point. Yeah. And I was gonna say, I now, you know, the technical term is cold water immersion. And that's a much better way of describing it because it is just cold water. It's not ice, but most people understand, you know, you say cold water immersion, they're like, what? like, yeah, well, ice baths and they go, Oh, I know what you're talking about. Even though it's not ice. Um, higher on the pyramid, we had cryo chambers and infrared treatment or infrared recovery. I just wanted to quickly brush on this one because I don't think a lot of recreational runners will be sorting this out for recovery, but where does the evidence lie and where does your suggestion lie when it comes to these methods? Yeah. Look, there's a little bit of evidence for cryotherapy chambers. However, you know, one, where do you find them? And a lot of the ones now are single person. So, you know, if you've been it's OK, I guess, if you're a recreational athlete and you can access one, but for a lot of teams, like you can't get lots of people through in a single person. So they're not very practical. But a little bit of evidence, we have to be very careful with them. There have been some deaths from people in cryotherapy chambers. So we kind of stay a little bit clear of them unless you're well supervised. But yeah, a bit of evidence about cryotherapy chambers. When it comes to infrared, they're getting really popular as a way of getting heat exposure in a more passive way. They're not as uncomfortable as being in like your typical type sauna. But infrared is... had almost no evidence, there's almost no studies that have actually looked at it in terms of a recovery strategy, which again is why we're kind of like, look, until we have some good science, especially with athletes, why don't you do the things that we have some good science for and make that as your priority. So look, infrared, getting popular, people thinking about using heat in the recovery period as a little bit of passive stress rather than pure recovery. But yeah, jury's out on that one until we get a bit more evidence. Okay. And then at the very tip of the pyramid, you just had like just generic fads. Are you able to list any fads that you've come across, any ones that are quite popular that we think that we should just discuss? Yeah, I have to be a bit careful because I've said brand names before and I've got myself into a lot of trouble. However... Yeah, we can dance around this a little bit. You know, there's electrical stimulation devices that I think, you know, they say they increase blood flow. I'm not really sure they do. Sometimes you can provide electrical stimulation and you can actually give yourself muscle damage because it's such a unique contraction. I know there's lots of different options now around massage guns. Again, we don't have any evidence around them. I've seen some... athletes hurt themselves using those the next day in terms of soreness. And look, I wouldn't completely say they're a fad because we just haven't, you know, got there with the research yet, but there's a chance that some. And when I think of fad, I think of things that can actually, either just one do not work or two may actually do people harm. And then remember those, I used to call them placebo bracelets, but you know, the little magnetic bracelets that people used to wear. I was probably about 20 years ago now. balance bracelets and magnetic bracelets and all these kinds of things that people used to get around in and I think you know someone made a stack of cash out of that and that's one thing I definitely consider as a fad. But yeah things come and go and you can understand when people are time poor and they want a quick fix and someone comes and tells them that this particular type of brain stimulation will make you smarter and fitter and you know and they're very convincing. But yeah, they, they tend to come and go pretty quickly if they don't have some good scientific backing at some point to them. Yeah. They can be very convincing and they can have some flashy ads and the placebo is pretty powerful in some of those cases as well. Uh, but it's good that we, we know now we have this pyramid and we know kind of what's at the top, what's at the bottom, what's important, what's not so important. And I'll just do a general recap as we sum up this, this podcast episode. So The very base of the pyramid, the most important is definitely asleep and downtime, so unwinding psychologically. We have your nutrition, hydration as the next level, then the third level, we have water immersion and all this, the practical takeaways we took, we took with that next from that, we have compression, active recovery and stretch, whatever feels good, uh, higher than that is massage. And then towards the tip of the pyramid, we have the. ones that aren't evidence based. So we've got the cryo chambers, the infrared and there was firefly. What's firefly in, in the, yeah. Yeah. That's one of the sort of electrical muscle stimulation type devices. I see again. Yep. And then we had all the fads that we've just described. So beautiful. Make sure that we're ticking the boxes at the base of the pyramid before we start to prioritize higher up. Once you've ticked all the boxes in the, in the pyramid, in the, in the lower bases, then you can start. you know, almost trial and erroring a couple of things that higher up on that pyramid. And it's, it's great to illustrate as well. The, what we talked about on previous episodes around the physical stress and the psychological stress as both components for recovery, we need to make sure that we're addressing both of those for recovery. And I think a lot of the treatment methods that we talked about today does help that psychological component as well helps to psychologically de-stress and psychologically recover, which is huge importance. And I think the podcast does illustrate the importance of that as well. Are there any final words, take home messages that we haven't necessarily discussed or things that we need to highlight in today's discussion before we wrap up? Look, I think we've covered most of the important recovery strategies, but just to reinforce what you said there at the end, which is that we are actually early days in terms of the recovery science. So trial and error and individuality and knowing what works for you and just paying a little bit of attention to even around sleep. Some people get by with seven, some need eight, some need nine. Just pay attention to what how, what makes you feel the best. And sometimes we get so busy in our lives, we don't get the chance to reflect and to think back about what things are working under what situations for us. So I think, yeah, I can come out and give all the advice and some recommendations, but yeah, it's really, think things through on an individual basis and what works for you and what you've tried and no harm in trying things. And if you absolutely love it. go for it. If you have, I know people absolutely hate ice baths, you know, just find, find things that are going to work for you. Yep, definitely. And if it's causing more psychological stress to think about doing these things, that's probably not the best for you anyway. As we wrap up Shona, is there any like social media handles or anywhere people can go if they want to learn more about you and your content? Yeah, Twitter is probably the main one that I do, which is just, I'm just at Shona Helson. I think I'm the only Shona Halston, so it should be easy enough to find. Um, but yeah, we, um, usually, uh, you know, true tweeting about some of our new research or some upcoming opportunities, or, uh, we're doing a lot of the infographics and those kinds of things now to get a message across in a simple way. So there's definitely, um, uh, hopefully there'll be some useful stuff, um, that's floating around on that, on the, on Twitter. Brilliant. Thanks for coming on. Like I said at the start, you're the very, very highly regarded you're the top of the spear with when it comes to researching this sort of stuff and everyone highly recommends you. So I want to thank you for taking the time to come on and share your knowledge and share a lot of information that a lot of runners need to know. So thanks once again. Great. Thanks, Brody. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Run Smarter podcast. I hope you can see the impact this content has on your future running. 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