I’d bet that comparing elites with regular folks just doesn’t work too well. And those studies must not include those who broke down from injury. Any athlete not able to continue with training due to inadequate recovery of any kind will be taking serious steps backwards. **In that study, inverse correlation means that those who rested too much didn’t progress in terms of performance. What a shocking conclusion! **
It is always about the appropriate balance of stress and rest. Our ‘debate’ is what is optimal rest.
There certainly is a great deal of variability in what training load athletes can handle and much depends on their genetics. Recovery for MOP athletes in general has a much broader range of needs, IMO. And I’m not even going to mention the, ahem, ‘older athlete’ which I’ve become.
That 1% recovery aids which includes ‘everything else’ becomes a much bigger number in that circumstance.
I hope you’ll grant me more assumed intellect than that implied by the bolded text above! hahahaha! I can assure you I wouldn’t take time to explain such a an intuitive phenomenon, but I can see why you might think that was a conclusion worth mocking for it’s obviousness if my initial comments led you to believe that was my conclusion. I apologize for being unclear.
Clarifying point:
The correlation being drawn was not between sleep, and/or nutrition, and/or training, and performance outcomes. The inverse correlation was between amount of time spent using auxiliary recovery modalities (like massage, PT, foam rolling, ice bathing, heating, stim, you name it, but NOT sleep/nutrition) and competitive performances.
Athlete ages ranged from 16-42, if I remember right.
I argue that recovery for MOP athletes have a much narrower range of needs than for elite athletes. Fatigue management and fueling is virtually everything. Elites are much more likely to push tissues to the brink of recoverability even with optimal sleep and nutrition, than MOP’ers, with all due respect to MOP athletes like myself.
I would estimate that importance of massage & PT only very very slightly increases for population in the 40-65y/o range and that fatigue management through sleep, nutrition, and intelligently applied age-appropriate progressive overload in training are still vastly more important. I have no data to support this claim.