Cycling Recovery Strategies: All You Need to Know as a Cyclist

Ever wondered about the secret of elite cycling athletes? How are they able to push their body to the limit as well as perform at such high levels every other day without succumbing to serious injuries?

Athletes Training

Cyclist athletes striving to perform at high levels must push their bodies to the limit. Additionally, they put their bodies through sessions of strength and conditioning, skills training almost every day.

As a result, strenuous training and sometimes competition schedules impose a tremendous amount of physical, mental stress on the athletes. 

As a matter of fact, if they cannot cope with the demand, fatigue and physical breakdown occur, leading to poor performance and cycling injuries.

Lastly, the key to allowing a cyclist to push their body to the limit without breaking down lies in a simple yet often neglected part of the training program – CYCLING RECOVERY.

The Importance of Cycling Recovery

The Head Coach of Australian Men’s Basketball said: “If there was one single factor that helped this team perform at the level they did, it was the recovery program”. 

Tour de France Legend Lance Armstrong also remarked “Recovery is the name of the game. whoever recovers the fastest does the best.”

Cycling recovery

Often mistaken as just rest – but it is so much more than that. Cycling recovery is a very crucial part of the training strategy that many amateur athletes are unaware of.

Athletes are always looking to train and to find new training methods to make themselves faster, stronger and better.

To adapt to the training at a high intensity, there must be appropriate recovery strategies in place.

We will explore a number of recovery strategies that have been used widely by elite athletes and their coaches successfully. 

These strategies are vital to aid the athlete to optimise their training and reducing the risk of illness and injury.

They include the use of compression garments, contrast baths, appropriate nutrition, passive and active recovery, sports massage and flotation tanks.

Sports massage therapy aim to rebalance the body and relieve aches, strains arising from related issues or repetitive strain injuries.