The Truth About Sports Recovery - Christie Aschwanden - #061

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. I'm finally back in the UK, and you will be delighted to hear that that means a return to the twice a week podcast publishing schedule. So let's get into it. This week, I'm sitting down with Christie aschwanden, who is the author of Good to Go, What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. Now, one of my favorite episodes so far was with Alex Hutchinson on the limits of human performance as he explained what he discovered during research for his book, Endure. And today, we're going to look at everything on the opposite end of that spectrum. So from fancy foam rollers to cryogenic therapy, saunas, sleep optimization, those compression pant things, those weird compression pant things, and every other form of recovery that you can think of, and you've seen athletes using on Instagram, we're going to go through them today. Christie has done a fantastic analysis of all of the different ways that people are trying to recover and assess just what sort of impact they're having. So if you are an athlete or you know one who is looking to improve their recovery, then today is absolutely for you. Please welcome Christie aschwanden.
Christie aschwanden, how are you today?

**Christie Aschwanden** (1:33)
I'm great, thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
Thank you for coming on. So, what are we going to learn about today?

**Christie Aschwanden** (1:39)
Exercise recovery, all things that have to do with exercise recovery.

**Chris Williamson** (1:44)
Okay, recently, some of the guests will know, the spot on the back of your book, that Mr. Alex Hutchinson, the man behind Endure, is a big proponent, a big supporter of your book. And obviously what he was talking about was a lot of the things to do within training, what's happening while you train and the experiences that you go through during a session. And you're now talking about everything else, I guess.

**Christie Aschwanden** (2:10)
Yeah, that's right. And I think that the two really make nice companion books. His book is all about training itself, whereas mine is about the recovery process and all of these adaptations and things that happen in between workouts.

**Chris Williamson** (2:22)
Fantastic. So where does the book begin?

**Christie Aschwanden** (2:26)
It actually begins at a place called Denver Sports Recovery, which is one of many, I like to think of them as recovery spas that have popped up all around the US. I'm not sure actually, are these the thing in the UK as well?

**Chris Williamson** (2:41)
I'm going to guess, is it one of those places where there's a cryo chamber and you can get an IV drip of nutrients and stuff like that?

**Christie Aschwanden** (2:49)
Yes, exactly.

**Chris Williamson** (2:50)
No, we are, unfortunately, in the UK, that's reserved for kind of elite level athletes. It's not the sort of thing, you can go to a spa and have a massage and go in a hot tub, but that's probably about the top end, I think, of what you can get in the UK, unfortunately.

**Christie Aschwanden** (3:10)
Yeah, that's interesting. I know that there are a few in Australia as well, but it's definitely become a thing here in the US.
These places, you can go in and for a fee, there are all sorts of things. It's not just massage and cryotherapy. You mentioned IVs, which is another common thing, but there are also all kinds of foam rollers. There are those, I call them squeezy pants, but they're pneumatic compression sleeves. They're like sleeping bags for your legs. You put them on and then they blow up with air and compress your muscles, and it frankly feels really nice. That's another popular one. They'll have ice baths, saunas, pretty much everything that you can purchase that would be used for recovery can be found at these places, at these recovery spas.

**Chris Williamson** (3:56)
Wow. OK. So you're at this spa, and what's the story from that?

**Christie Aschwanden** (4:02)
Yeah. So that was kind of an introduction for me of looking at, OK, when I was an elite athlete, so I'll just step back for a second, I used to be a runner, then I became a cross-country skier and cyclist. And when I was doing these things at an elite level in the early 2000s and late 90s, recovery was really something that we weren't doing. It was something, and what I mean by that is, it was all these things that we weren't doing. You weren't standing up, you weren't staying out late at night, you weren't running around doing other stressful things. So recovery was really about lying on the couch, maybe putting your nose in a book, but putting your feet up and resting. Maybe you took a nap or something. But now, sort of in the interim, recovery has become its own thing, and almost an extension of training, where people are doing all of these things. They're putting on these squeezy pants, they're massaging all of their muscles with a foam roller, they're getting massage, and massage is something that is very old and was done in my time as well. But it's become something where there's a sense that you need to do all these things, and it's not enough to just lie back and wait for recovery to happen, but you need to do things to facilitate it.