top of page

Should you do active recovery after HIIT running sessions?

🔥Interesting study on the role of active recovery for endurance training adaptations. Could it be an easy "add on" to get better results from your training?


🏃🏽‍♀️We actually made the experience in our own training that after finishing your main workout with proper intensity, even small additional workouts at lighter intensities can still hit you quite a bit. Naturally a function of being pre-fatigued, maybe this is a good strategy to get the most out of your HIIT sessions? Adding a bit of extra work without killing yourself?


🚴The last slide includes a practical example from my training a few days ago to illustrate how you could incorporate: I did two 20 min waves of the "Death by EMOM" on the bike, starting at 10cal and ending at 31 cal (first round) and then directly doing 10-27cal. Afterwards I spend another 20min just comfortably paddling on the bike. The last 20 min were active recovery, where I averaged just about 12 cal/min. It wasn't too bad and the time passed relatively quickly, but due to the pain of the intense training immediately before it, I could probably still reap a bit of an benefit from it.


🤔A lot of people obviously do this sort of thing already, and it seems to work quite well for them. Even though a major impact on performance per se couldn't be found in the study above. More research is needed to improve the data availability on the matter.


👇🏼Let us know what you think in the comments!


Reference

Wiewelhove et al., Active Recovery After High-Intensity Interval-Training Does Not Attenuate Training Adaptation, Front Physiol 2018.





Comments


bottom of page