Recovery is probably the most underrated component of training. This is particularly true in the world of the age groupers who cumulate family life, work life and training, leaving very little time for recovery and potentially creating additional negative stress and inevitable over reaching.
Recovery is not a simple metric to address and recovery should be addressed from the recovery in between your intervals in a single session, the recovery in between two daily sessions and your day after day recovery.
From a session to a weekly program: STRESS + RECOVERY = POSITIVE ADAPTATION.
While technology is sports science has brought us new potential ways to benchmark the level of proper recovery: Training scores, HRV etc… nothing beats the basic of perception when well applied.
I remember listening to a podcast with Joel Filliol who is without doubts, one of the most outstanding elite performance coaches out there and his mentioning of a permanent recording of the volume/intensity/RPE on daily basis as a simple gauge of the level of the fatigue of his athletes. It worked the magic and probably beat most of the electronic geeks.
So, in your case…do you recover enough?
Coach Chris