How to recover

To recover properly? Is it possible to do something wrong or right? From my point of view, the topic of recreation and mental health offers plenty of room for intuitively correct action. But does our time allow this space?

Sports is all

To speak in such a complex life style of a professional athlete of Work Life Balance is difficult. As an athlete with high performance requirements, the entire life is often subordinated to the pursuit of sport. By definition, it would therefore be very easy for me to classify my season vacation  as rationally planned and clearly targeted. A bit of rest just to fire up a daily high-performance strut with even more will and fresh power. A drastic formulation and not easy for outsiders to understand.

Recognize relaxation

For me as an athlete and public person, free, unplanned time is very precious. Managers and self-employed people in a wide range of professions also speak of this unconsciously seemingly seamless threshold of free time and operational work-related action. Personally, this fact hardly worries me. All speak of the desire of the fulfilled profession and life. So in my view, a seamless transition in the life progression of work and leisure is truly not cruel. Nevertheless, our mind has to consciously perceive the lived phases, I think a recovery in the state of the training – flow for little sense.

Green is on everyone’s lips

As many of you know from my Instagram stories, in the short daily breaks, I often get drawn to the green. So also in the seasonal holiday 2018. Green is associated with a natural environment, healthy plants, good air and pure nature. Back to the roots, as it were, back to our roots without skyscrapers, noise and perceptible environmental pollution. Instinctive life on vacation often makes me wake up with the first rays of sunshine and slowly come to rest with the last light. In between is hiked, enjoyed and at various places, whether coast, forest or mountain paused and deliberately decelerated. Will I be asked if I have not visited a weight room for three weeks, I often have to smile and like to ask back – when did you last hike with 10kg of photo equipment and water on your back for 7 hours?

Even proper recovery needs practice

After a long season and a huge flood of emotions, the body needs time to realize or accept the recovery. We are programmed at full speed and our spirit lives on at the beginning of the holiday in the Hatz on. Many know the phenomenon of illness on vacation. This is the moment when the body finally approves the time-out itself and regulates the urge to strain again. Looking forward to a recovery phase plays a positive role in correct recovery. So we can slowly but surely begin the acclimatization phase in the recovery in the last few working days.

Minimize smoke signals of the 21st century

Rain, snow, sun and wind have always been there, cell phones, messengers and many other 21st century smoke signals. Our body, including our genetics, did not have 30 years to get used to the enormous growth rates of the flood of information. Of course, we see all the benefits in everyday life and I see myself as a clear digital junky. Nevertheless, I see reason for caution. Evaluating information is exhausting and distracts us clearly from the recovery. Just try it on a remote footpath, no reception – dead silence. After a few hours at the latest, you forgot to worry about the messenger ringtone, because it does not work. This feeling of freedom, which we first create in medial capture, is something fine – really relaxing.

Real recovery is still individual

I do not want to set any benchmarks in this blog entry or position myself as a Pabst of Recovery. As a competitive athlete I live from our very highest capital – the health and motivation of our own body. So I have learned to handle it carefully and yet be able to fathom limits. Certainly a balancing act and dance on the razor blade, but it was exactly in this challenge that I learned how important conscious recovery is. The time a person needs to recover is enormously individual and barely predictable. Mostly we live in the time-table format of our employers, coaches or families and will never have the opportunity to experience our “maximum recovery” spontaneously and situationally. But we can do our best every day and in every planning phase to give our body the chance to take a breath.