Remember, you are either gaining fitness while training, or losing fitness & recovering. The goal is to lose as little fitness as possible while recovering.Um. Isn’t it exactly the opposite of this? You essentially wreck yourself training, and your body rebuilds itself slightly better during recovery. You start losing fitness once recovery is complete.
Yes, you need recovery to realize the gains, and to fully utilize it you need a taper, but while recovering, your also losing fitness. Recovery is nessesarily to gain fitness, but it doesn’t build fitness. Recovery will always shed some of the fitness. It has a cost.
In utilities with power generation, it’s called " house load" . A big natural gas power might generate let’s say 500megawatts gross output , but it requires maybe 5mw just to run pumps, blowers, lighting, controls, etc.