Recovery and training load for hybrid athletes

Recovery, on this blog, means one practical thing: have you absorbed the training you did well enough to do the session you planned next? The six articles below cover the signals you can actually measure for that (HRV, resting heart rate, sleep), how to count load when half your week is barbell work, and what happens to each half of your fitness when you stop.

Nothing here is medical advice. These are training signals, read against your own history. If you feel unwell, have chest pain, faint, or notice a symptom that worries you, stop training and see a clinician. A watch number doesn't rule anything in or out.

Recovery is the third training variable, next to strength and engine. Take one away and the other two collapse.

A runner has one kind of fatigue to manage. You have two, and they don't show up the same way. Heart rate tracks a steady run well.¹ It tracks a lifting session badly: across one study's resistance training sessions, heart-rate-based load scores lined up only weakly with how hard athletes rated the sessions (r = 0.25 to 0.52, depending on the method).² Halson's review of load monitoring separates external load (the work you did: kilos, kilometres, minutes) from internal load (what it cost you: heart rate, perceived effort), and points out that a gap opening between the two can be how fatigue shows itself.¹ So the first job is knowing what each signal can and can't see.

Start here#

HRV for hybrid athletes: how to read it without overreacting comes first. The fix it explains, reading your own baseline band instead of a population "good" number, applies to every other signal on this page.

Session RPE training load for lifting and running covers one load unit that works for lifting and running, and why the popular acute:chronic workload ratio is shakier than its reputation.

Does HRV-guided training work? goes further on HRV: the trials that adjusted training day by day from a morning reading, and what they did and didn't show.

Resting heart rate as a training signal is the older, cheaper cousin of HRV, with real limits worth knowing before you lean on it.

Sleep and training for hybrid athletes sticks to what sleep loss does to performance in studies, without the wellness padding.

Detraining: how fast strength and engine fade when you stop answers the question every injured or busy athlete asks, and shows that your two halves fade on different clocks.

Related reading#

Deload and cutback weeks live in the hybrid training pillar: deload weeks for hybrid athletes. How hard to push your lifting when you also run is in RPE, RIR and failure. Every metric the app shows, and which parts of it are our own design choices rather than published science, is laid out on the science page.