John
June 21, 2009, 12:53am
12
Rest & Recovery are significantly under-appreciated by coaches and athletes alike. We spend copious hours and tons of energy studying work. We research it to death and talk to our colleagues about it. If you had a microphone on and if you monitored how much time you and the athletes spend thinking and talking about work and you compared it to how much you spend on rest, you would be shocked. It’s probably less than 1%. As I have aged and coached ageing athletes, I have come to appreciate that designing and implementing rest and types of rest is perhaps more important than work and the types of work. I think taht is why in some countries we see great youth programmes, great junior programmes and then when they get to the emerging and elite level, it stops. The culprit is the work to rest balance and when that is not correct, the injuries mount.
A guy from here spent a week with Pfaff earlier this year and without doubt the emphasis on and amount of recovery work was the thing he noticed. The planning was actually a pretty similar structure to what most here are familiar with via CF.