As you get more serious about your training and goals, upgrading your recovery makes more and more sense. That could be taking your career more seriously as a young athlete, stepping up to a marathon or triathlon, or getting ready for the next CrossFit Open.
Every decision about how you spend your time, energy, and money can impact your ability to recover, adapt, and perform at a high level.
The best athletes don’t just train hard; they train and recover intelligently, prioritizing high-return strategies that maximize performance while minimizing unnecessary stress.
This guide is built on our experience working with elite Olympic athletes, professionals and serious recreational athletes pursuing new goals, helping them design sustainable practices that fit their lifestyle, personal preferences, and budget.
Now you probably don’t have the time and/or resources of a pro athlete to spend on recovery. Whether its your company, career, or family, those things take time. But you can still look to make choices that enhance recovery when you are pursuing a goal like a marathon, a tournament or a big adventure trip.
The goal is to help you think critically about removing negative stressors and adding positive effectors, ensuring that your time and resources go into what truly makes a difference.
Afterall, not everything being promoted on social media is worth it, even if it actually works.
Considering Choices Based on a Cost/Benefit Ratio
Athletes must make decisions about upgrading their recovery based on the trade-offs between cost and benefit. We often help athletes by creating a two-axis matrix:
- Cost Axis: This includes not just monetary expense, but also the time and emotional energy required to implement a strategy. These are all important and finite resources. Even if you have the money, do you have the time or willpower to do it?
- Benefit Axis: This measures either how much negative stress the intervention removes (on the left side) or how much positive impact it adds (on the right side). We have to look at this through multiple perspectives as we can impact some or all of the four pillars of recovery.
By plotting different strategies on this matrix, athletes can prioritize interventions that provide the greatest benefit for the lowest cost while avoiding those with high cost and low return.
For example:
- Removing sleep disruptors (e.g., alcohol, staying up too late) has low cost and high benefit from removing a negative.
- Implementing a fully customized nutrtion plan with prepared meals is a big beneift but expensive, while eating out less, and cooking more can have big benfit with less cost.
- Advanced recovery tools like cryotherapy or hyperbaric oxygen therapy may provide moderate benefit but come with high financial and logistical costs, making them a lower priority unless foundational strategies are already in place.
Whats The Benefits– Four Pillars of Recovery & Stress
When selecting the right recovery strategies for upgrading your recovery, it’s important to consider the Four Pillars of Recovery we developed over the years.
These pillars address the key areas that influence your body’s recovery process and ensure that you’re targeting the right type of recovery at the right time.
Here’s a breakdown of each pillar:
- Tissue Recovery: This focuses on the physical recovery of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints after exercise. Techniques like soft tissue work, assisted stretching, or myofascial release can help break down muscle stiffness and encourage proper healing.
- Energy Recovery: After strenuous physical activity, your body needs to restore its energy systems. Proper nutrition, hydration, and methods like blood flow restriction and pneumatic compression help to replenish glycogen stores, remove metabolic wastes, and support energy recovery.
- Mindset Recovery: Mental and emotional stress can impede physical recovery. Relaxation practices such as meditation, mindfulness, and focused breathing techniques help reduce stress and improve the body’s natural recovery processes by calming the nervous system.
- Nervous System Recovery: High-intensity exercises can place a strain on the nervous system, reducing performance and increasing fatigue. Strategies like rest, sleep, and techniques that reduce neural fatigue, such as red light therapy or specific recovery movements, help restore the nervous system’s efficiency and readiness.
You can quickly see that depending on your sport and personal life, which systems need the most support will differ.
This is key part of creating a personal cost benefit matrix; it depends on your sport, goals, and lifestyle.
Get the Biggest ROI
When upgrading your recovery options, athletes and active individuals should consider the concept of return on investment (ROI). But not just in terms of cost, but also in how effectively a treatment upgrades recovery in the most important pillars.
The right recovery strategy can enhance mobility, reduce pain, and prevent injuries, all of which contribute to long-term progress and better overall results.
And remember this is very individual. Your access to resources, specific recovery needs, the mental/emotional costs you experience differ from others.
By focusing on methods that provide the greatest impact for their time and effort, individuals can ensure they are investing in their future success, not just short-term relief.
The goal is to maximize efficiency by investing in strategies that offer the best ratio of input to output.
Adding Positives vs. Subtracting Negatives
Athletes must carefully manage finite resources, and adding new positive habits often requires significant time, energy, and money. Therefore, adding positives is a limited strategy, while subtracting negatives is often more sustainable and effective.
- Subtracting Negatives: This should be the first priority because it often requires only behavioral change and minimal financial investment. Removing sleep disruptors (e.g., late-night screens, caffeine), cutting unnecessary training stress, and managing lifestyle inefficiencies create immediate benefits with little added effort.
- Adding Positives: While beneficial, adding new recovery tools or training strategies requires additional investment. Modalities like massage, sauna, and supplementation may enhance recovery, but their effectiveness depends on an already optimized foundation.
- Balancing Both: The most effective approach is to first remove barriers to recovery before selectively adding high-ROI interventions. Subtracting negatives creates the space for positives to be more impactful when they are introduced.
By prioritizing high-ROI strategies and focusing on removing negative stressors before adding new interventions, athletes can maximize recovery without unnecessary expense.
High-ROI Strategies for Upgrading Your Recovery
Once the conceptual framework is in place, athletes can begin prioritizing specific strategies that yield the highest return on investment.
Key High-ROI Strategies:
- Optimize sleep quality: Sleep is the body’s primary recovery mechanism. A consistent schedule, proper night time habits, and a better sleep environment can drastically improve deep sleep quality. The cost varies from minimal to moderate, yet the benefits for energy, focus, and muscle repair are immense.
- Refine nutrition and hydration: Eating whole, nutrient-dense foods and maintaining proper hydration ensures your body has the raw materials needed for muscle repair and immune function. The investment is primarily in meal planning and preparation. However, the long-term returns on energy levels and performance can far outweigh the effort.
- Reduce unnecessary training stress: Many athletes end up doing exercises with high energy or orthopedic loads that provide little return. Identifying and removing these from a program allows better recovery while maintaining or improving performance.
- Eliminate lifestyle stressors: Mental and emotional stress drain recovery resources. Managing financial concerns, reducing daily commutes, improving work(school)-life balance, and reducing daily inefficiencies can create more capacity for training and rest.
Lifestyle – The Foundation of Recovery
Its not the shiny and sext things you see on social media, but its what has the biggest impact. After all, these are the habits and things that take up more hours in your day than anything else.
Key Upgrades to Your Recovery:
- SLEEP: Target 7-9 hours per night with consistent sleep and wake times. Sleep hygiene practices, such as maintaining a dark, cool environment and limiting screen time before bed, enhance recovery without any cost beyond behavioral changes.
- STRESS MANAGEMENT: Chronic stress increases cortisol, which can impair recovery and adaptation. Techniques such as mindfulness, structured downtime, and proper scheduling can improve mental resilience at little to no cost.
- NUTRITION: Eating high-quality, whole foods supports energy levels and reduces inflammation. The cost of whole foods is often comparable to processed foods, but the performance benefits make it a valuable trade-off.
- HYDRATION: Proper hydration is critical for joint lubrication, digestion, and nutrient transport. Drinking enough water and replenishing electrolytes, particularly after intense training, is a simple, low-cost strategy with significant benefits.
These foundational changes provide the greatest long-term benefits with minimal cost or effort.
Tissue – Maintaining Durability & Resilience
A durable body withstands training stress and stays injury-free longer. Tissue work and proper training strategies keep muscles, tendons, and fascia healthy.
Key Strategies:
- Soft Tissue Work: Regular massage and self-myofascial release (foam rolling, massage guns) help maintain tissue quality and range of motion. While professional treatments have a cost, self-care tools are a lower-cost alternative with high return.
- High-ROI Training Adjustments:
- Deep Core: Are you doing enough to support the functions of stability, rotation and force transfer in your torso. Not just “ab work”, but actual work in the deep core and pelvis. Keep consistent doses of exercises that challenge your core in 3 dimensions is key.
- Helathy Tendons: If you have suffered tendon pain, are you doing something like isometrics to help? Tendon health improves with prolonged tension exposure. Spanish squats and Copenhagen planks are low-cost, high-benefit options for joint stability.
- Foot and ankle strength: Strong feet and ankles reduce injury risk, improve balance, and enhance ground reaction force. Barefoot drills and specific strengthening exercises are easy to implement with minimal cost.
- Eliminate Low ROI High-Stress Exercises: Exercises that create lots of orthopedic stress but do not contribute significantly to performance should be removed or replaced. This approach improves longevity and reduces unnecessary orthopedic wear and tear
- Heavy, high volume strength training when its no longer improving performance
- High wear and tear exercises that interfere with readiness for practice
- Movement that continue to cause recurring injuries that sideline you from training
Putting It All Together – A Plan for Upgrading Your Recovery
By systematically removing negatives and adding high-impact positives, athletes can create a recovery-focused lifestyle.
- Start by identifying your particular needs based on the Four Pillars. Consider the demands of your activity and your daily life.
- Then map a personal cost benefit matrix with negatives that add stress and possible practices that would add positives.
- Consider cost in terms of time, money, energy, and will power.
- Prioritize startegeis and implment the top ones for 30-90 days. Track changes before and after if possible.
Prioritizing big ROI upgrades to your recovery big adding positives or subtracting negatives in these areas.
- Start with the biggest lifestyle wins: Sleep, nutrition, and stress management.
- Fuel effectively: Lock in daily nutrition, then refine supplement strategies.
- Improve durability: Tissue work and eliminating unnecessary training stress.
- Support nervous system health: Add recovery techniques like sauna and breathwork.
