SIT Recovery - How much? Perhaps more than you think

And NOOO I don't mean you can sit more

Today I'm talking about recovery and since this is such a broad topic and certainly worthy of more articles, I’m confining myself to talking about how long to recover from short sprint intervals. These are often referred to as; Short Intense Intervals (SIT ironically). They involve moving as fast as possible for around 30 seconds. They can sound intimidating if you are new to intervals, but are, I would argue, essential if you want to minimise age related changes to power and speed.

It's Autumn here in the Northern hemisphere, and with the return to cooler temperatures doing these intervals, can be more appealing, if like me, you easily overheat in the summer. You can do them swimming, biking, running, skiing or whatever your preferred cardio activity is. The choice is yours. I've deployed them in skiing and more recently running and it's nothing short of astounding what a difference they make, to my running. Even if I never race again, I want to keep as much speed and power as possible. Surely that's what we all want? but as someone with an abundance of slow twitch muscle fibres built for endurance I've always struggled to persuade myself to do enough of them to make a real difference, even knowing how good they would be for me. Finally, last Winter, fed up of getting slower and slower, I put my 'Big Girl Pants' on and committed to SIT twice a week. This entailed 15-45 seconds at what I like to say is 'eye balls popping' speed. Of course, this is massive exaggeration, but hopefully you get the idea. I allowed myself as much recovery, as I thought I needed, between each interval, in order to produce a quality effort.

But, this generous recovery strategy isn’t how everybody does their short intervals. 30 seconds hard followed by 30 seconds rest, seems to be a popular choice. It’s simple and sounds like a rationale way to prep for races, in which you might want to get your body used to working hard, whilst still fatigued. Certainly in my younger PT days I was notorious for delivering sessions in which I’d barely let my client recover before launching into another interval. They really felt I was doing my job, as did I. But now, I’m not so sure I was doing them any favours. Just because it feels hard to complete doesn’t necessarily mean this is the best way.

PennyA Powering her way to new strengths

Looking to science to tell us how long to rest, isn’t much help, sadly. Lots has been written about the work bit of an interval, but the recovery side is only now starting to be explored and of course it's small studies, usually on trained, young, male individuals. Early indications are however pointing to more rest as being better and that’s before any age factor is taken into account. This article; https://www.sportsperformancebulletin.com/training/high-intensity-training/interval-training-the-long-and-short-of-rest-between-efforts

nicely summarises where we are at with the research to date.

In the past I’ve used heart rate to set the recovery time but sometimes the heart recovers faster than the rest of you, leaving you vulnerable to injury. Generally, I advise going by feel; when you feel recovered from your sprint, go again. If in doubt, wait longer and take reassurance that a few extra seconds is probably a good thing. If you are able to pull off an interval that is equal or faster than your last one, then you got the recovery roughly right. It's important to remember, that this isn’t cheating the session, even if you need a couple of minutes to ready yourself for a 30 second sprint interval, which on some level seems absurd. Better to take extra rest than to deliver a half-hearted sprint. Plus, with this approach, you can tune into how it’s going for that particular day and adjust accordingly (adaptability is a key skill for those of you who are largely self coached, active oldies). Having read the new research appearing, I’m inclined to experiment with adding more recovery time this Winter. If yesterdays session is anything to go by, it'll be a challenge to change the old ingrained habit of cutting the recovery to a minimum. But, I'll just have to remind myself that, you don’t have to mirror a race experience in training to get good gains.

I strongly believe we produce way better quality intervals if we give ourselves sufficient time between hard sprints. Quality, as we age, always trumps quantity. If that wasn’t reason enough I think insufficient recovery for older individuals carries some unnecessary increased injury risk. This could be either in the form of a muscle or tendon strains or the risk of tripping when fatigued. We can’t escape the fact that we have less collagen and are at increased injury risk as a result. So for me, adding in more recovery time so that each interval is delivered fresh, reduces this risk.  For that reason I would rather you finish a session, with 1 or 2 more intervals still in the tank, than completely wiped out.

The added bonus of all this is that the sessions can be way more appealing and actually fun & energising, rather than leaving you totally drained and dreading future sessions. Win, win.

I'd love to hear how your SIT-ing goes

Kate L on today's sprint. Making short work of the 25 degree, steep slopes to join the exclusive 'over 50s sprint to the top of the village' club

References & further reading:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35937777/ 2022 systematic review nutrition for tendons (collagen)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36044324/ (collagen specifically)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5793325/ (post menopausal)