How is it that a professional athlete can be vigorously active for eight hours a day and manage to recover and improve, and average Joes struggle to recover from that many exercise-hours in a week?

Genetics certainly plays a role--resistance to injury, and resilience after injury, are among the least-discussed keys to athletic greatness (go re-watch the great documentary Hoop Dreams for proof).  But a large part of it is the close attention that pros pay to recovery. 

For many years, I was of the "go hard all the time" school, rationalizing that my weekly workout hours were limited, and that I should maximize my workouts by redlining from the moment I set foot in the gym to the time I hit the shower.  I'd do the same for my clients. 

While some people--maybe a lot of people--need to learn the "intensity" lesson (it's certainly a topic that generates lots of ink and pixel-space), an equal number need to learn to balance their intense sessions with smart recovery practices.  It's the ol' yin-yang of working out:  as smart and hard as you exercise, you've got to arrange your life to recover from those sessions as well, or your efforts will go for nothing.

Here's a recent article on sleep--and new, drug-free tactics for getting a good night's worth.  The author discusses sleep "nutrients"--specific benefits derived from each particular phase of sleep. 

There's also an interesting discussion of the sleep-inducing benefits of 'micro-movements'--tiny, sometime almost imperceptible muscle actions:

Fold your hands in your lap, lacing the fingers and thumbs. Then straighten your index fingers, so the pads of the two fingers rest against each other. Sit quietly like that for five to ten minutes. A huge amount of real estate in the brain is devoted to the hands. When you’re awake and active, the hands are very busy, and so is your brain. When you stabilize your hands like that, your brain slows down, and you become calm and tranquil. That’s one reason why Christians fold their hands when they pray...Large, vigorous, powerful movements are stimulating to the brain. Slow, soft, infrequent movements are tranquilizing. When you make very small movements—as small as you can, so small they’re barely perceptible—they quiet the body and mind.

I tried this; it does work, pretty much instantly.  This exercise reminds me of the kinds of things we sometimes did in acting class; it's not hard, for instance, to manufacture the feeling of anger; simply pound your fist on a table--you'll naturally start to feel it, no matter how sunny your disposition.  This exercise suggests that assuming the attitude of tranquility actually creates a state of tranquility.  Fake it, in other words, and you WILL make it.  

Another point:

Most people with insomnia exhibit symptoms of hyper-arousal—a chronic over-activation of the body’s innate stress-response mechanism. It’s like being in fight-or-flight, emergency-response mode non-stop. You can’t just switch that off at bedtime. If you want to get a handle on insomnia, you need to do something about hyper-arousal not just at bedtime, but during the day, too.

A body-worker friend of mine recently pointed out that fear is a fairly ubiquitous state in nature:  out in the wild, after all, there's always the chance you'll be taken out by a maverick grizzly bear or great-white.  But most animals don't appear tense or nervous; they aren't jittery and covered in flop-sweat like you or I before the big PowerPoint presentation; they just seem alert--aware of the dangers around them but not overwhelmed by them.  If animals can do this in the wild, with predators at every turn, surely you and I can chill out a little, even though our kid wasn't accepted into Tiger Tots Golf Camp and Janine got Employee of the Month again?

Another good article on recovery was in Outside back in February. The author is attempting to build up to a half-marathon with job, wife, kids, mortgage, the whole slam.  After seeing an expert coach, the message was clear:  he was pushing himself too hard: 

Based on [treadmill test] results, Henderson said I should do the bulk of my training at a low intensity. This was easy on the body—when I stuck to Henderson's recommended workout intensities I could do long runs without feeling very tired afterwards—but tough on the ego. I was consistently passed by people twice my age, people pushing strollers, people wearing cotton.

Other workouts consisted of easy runs punctuated by three-minute high-intensity intervals. Henderson hounded me about the importance of recovery between those intervals—slowing down so that my body would be prepared for the next effort. As for pre- and post-workout routines, it turns out that a proper warm-up and cooldown are far more important than the half-assed stretching I'd grown accustomed to.

As a guy who's always impatient with the recovery time between my interval efforts, this was a good reminder to take the time it takes for the body to wind down before ramping up again.