The last two winters I've spent training for fire season I found myself running into injuries. Literally. Running so much that I would hurt my ankle or my calf. I had to take so much time off of exercise to recover that I really wasn't making a lot of gains. Although my fitness has improve dramatically since I have returned to regular working out, my body's ability to recover has not been able to keep up with the amount of working out I'm willing to do.
This winter I purchased a subscription to Whoop. It comes with a Whoop Bracelet you wear 24/7. The accompanying app then tracks a couple vital signs and give you readings of how much strain you have put on your body that day, how much recovery your body got done while you slept, and how much sleep and how efficient your sleep was the night before. After a couple months of wearing and checking my Whoop Bracelet I began to see a correlation with nights that I drank alcohol and really low recovery percentages. If I don't drink alcohol I can normally expect a 70%-90% recovery over night after a heavy workout the day before. But if I drink enough drinks to get a buzz, my recovery the next day will be in the single digits.
I have heard for a long time that alcohol affects your body's ability to recover from workouts but I never really considered how much it might affect me. It doesn't stop me from drinking alcohol, but I have come to have a strong reason not to drink to excess, because I feel that the work my body has to do to break down the alcohol take away from my body's ability to repair itself after a tough workout.
But there really is something to be said for having a shower beer after a long run. Everything in moderation. And I believe the Whoop Bracelet facilitates just that.
Comments
Post a Comment