Today, before work, I did a one hour ‘Active Recovery’ ride on my bike trainer.  These rides might seem way too easy and a waste of time, but they are a very important part of my workout schedule.

Active recovery workouts are literally that … activity that helps you recover.  In my workout schedule, they take the place of ‘rest days’.  When doing active recovery, it actually feels like a rest day, compared to the days when I do my other workouts.  That is because active recovery workouts are, and should be, very easy efforts.

The purpose of an active recovery workout is to help your body.  The easy effort gets your blood flowing without taxing your muscles or aerobic system.  The blood flow helps flush toxins from your muscles, which is a lot of what recovery actually is.

You can see in today’s photo that my effort this morning was pretty much as it should be, for this kind of workout.  My heart rate never got out of Zone 1 … in fact my maximum recorded heart rate was only 121 bpm today.  My power was maybe a little high, because it was mostly in Zone 2, rather than in Zone 1.  What these numbers don’t tell you however is my perceived effort … which was really low; I would say Level 2.  The power got into Zone 2 because I was cycling at a fairly high cadence. At no point in this workout did I feel like I was pushing anything but a super easy effort.

So that’s active recovery workouts.  They don’t seem like they are worth the time, but I can assure you, they help a lot…