Recovery Isn’t a Product. It’s a Practice.

I was lucky enough to attend the Female Athlete Research Meeting at Stanford University last week, and unsurprisingly, one of the consistent themes was the important role recovery plays in performance.

During one panel, an extremely accomplished coach shared a piece of advice she’d received early in her career:

“Tell them how hard you work, but not how much you rest.”

This sentiment stuck with me because it reveals a quiet truth: in elite sport, rest is the secret.
The work gets the spotlight, but recovery is where the gains are made.

For many of us, that highlights a cultural blind spot — we glorify the grind, then wonder why we’re always tired.

Recovery isn’t the opposite of hard work. It is the work.

It’s the biological, emotional, and logistical work that allows adaptation to happen.

But the very traits that make athletes successful — discipline, drive, pride in hard work — can also make us resistant to rest. We seek improvement. We love structure. We hold ourselves to a high standard.

These are the traits that get us out the door before sunrise… and the same ones that make it hard to hear the internal voice begging for a day off.

It doesn’t help that we’re constantly fed media hyping the “next big” recovery product — often with little to no research behind it. We’ve started treating recovery like a consumer category, not a capacity we build from the inside out.

Intrinsic Health > External Fixes

A recent paper in Science Advances reframes health as the body’s intrinsic ability to adapt to stress — a dynamic state of resilience built from within, not something that can be bought or biohacked.

That idea should change how athletes and coaches think about recovery.

You can’t shortcut intrinsic health with a protein powder, compression boots, or a cold plunge. Those tools can help — but only if they’re built on a foundation of consistent sleep, balanced nutrition, emotional stability, and training that fits your real life.

No recovery shake will undo poor daily nutrition.
No massage gun will override chronic stress and five hours of sleep.
No app can replace listening to your body.

Recovery starts with the habits that keep your body and mind responsive — not rigid — in the face of load, life, and change.

The Recovery Mindset

Good recovery isn’t about doing less; it’s about absorbing more.
It’s about cultivating the physical and psychological systems that make you adaptable.

That means:

Fueling like training matters every day, not just after hard workouts.
Protecting sleep like it’s your most important session (because it is).
Giving yourself permission to back off before your body forces you to.
Treating emotional stress as real training load — your body doesn’t know the difference.

The athletes who thrive long-term aren’t the ones who push hardest in a single week — they’re the ones who’ve built the routines, awareness, and humility to keep showing up stronger, smarter, and more grounded year after year.

When Technology Helps (and When It Doesn’t)

*Determine what data are helpful, and what just gets in the way.*

I love that our devices can help us understand recovery better — HRV, sleep scores, training readiness — but athletes take these messages to heart, and the tone of that feedback matters.

Garmin telling you you’re “unproductive” after a recovery week can chip away at confidence. Oura reminding you your body needs rest can reinforce self-awareness. Same data, different message — and that difference changes behavior.

Pay attention to how your robots are talking to you, and whether they’re saying things that actually help you grow as an athlete.

Recovery technology should inform your intuition, not replace it.
If your watch makes you feel bad for listening to your body, it’s not helping.

And while we’re on the topic of feedback — let’s talk Strava.
You know the athletes who log their sub-8-minute miles as “recovery runs” while their heart rate sits in the red zone? They’re not recovering; they’re performing recovery cosplay.

The real heroes are the ones who can let their pace slow way down without feeling the need to defend it. The ones who know an easy run isn’t about optics — it’s about physiology.

Those athletes are laughing their way to the finish line — still healthy, still improving, and still loving the sport.

What Real Recovery Looks Like

True recovery isn’t glamorous. It looks like:

Meal prepping instead of grabbing a bar on the way to work.
Going to bed early instead of queuing up another episode on TV.
Logging an easy run and actually keeping it easy.
Saying “no” to another workout because you want to say “yes” to long-term progress.

These aren’t acts of laziness — they’re acts of respect.
For your body. For your goals. For the long game.

Because the strongest athletes aren’t the ones who can take the most load — they’re the ones who can keep adapting to it.

And the secret to that? It’s not another training block.
It’s the courage to rest.