Older Athletes Need More Time to Recover. Or Do We?

There is a common perception among older athletes that recovery from training and competition takes longer and longer as we age.

“Recovery” may mean different things for the older athlete, including recovery from injury, recovery between training days, recovery from competition and even recovery from post- race partying. In this blog I’m going to focus on recovery from post-race partying…. no wait, that’s a future blog, I need to do more research on that first.

This blog will focus on recovery from training and competition.

Even though the perceived wisdom is that older athletes take longer to recover than younger athletes (sub 30-35) the available evidence and research on this is somewhat unclear and in some cases, contradictory. This common belief, that recovery is impaired with age, is clearly popular if you pay attention to the abundance of articles about this on the internet and social media. Despite all this anecdotal evidence there is very little research to support this belief, especially when it comes to well -trained Masters Athletes.

The proposed mechanisms commonly put forward for longer recovery in masters’ athletes are- 1. Greater fatigue than younger athletes as a result of the same exercise bout resulting in the need for a comparatively longer rest/ recovery period 2. Slower rate of recovery leading to impaired physiological adaptation and 3. Both of these mechanisms combined.

To understand why recovery from exercise and athletic performance is vitally important it’s best to review the principles of training and adaptation first.

According to Fell and Williams, in “The effect of aging on skeletal-muscle recovery from exercise.” Journal of Aging and Physical Activity-

“Most forms of physical training lead to the progression of fatigue, which effectively reduces the capacity for peak performance. However, this mechanism is essential to the training process as it provides the stimulus for recovery processes that enable the stressed systems to adapt and improve.”

In other words training creates a stressful load on our physiological systems which then adapt and get stronger preparing us for the next training load.

Well at least that’s what should happen.

The key here is that our body needs time to adapt and rebuild after a bout of exercise or a competition. In other words- recover. It’s during this period of recovery and rebuilding after we exercise, that we become faster and stronger. This process is known as “Supercompensation”.

The period of recovery is dependent on several variables- the sport/ activity, the phase of training or competition season, the goals of the athlete and, maybe, age.