VAL sourness from tongue gone, too!
Until recently, I was a devout believer in the notion that success wouldn’t come unless I was immersed in the reservoir of hard work.
Put the time in, don’t slack, rewards they come.
The result, a salad of injuries, back, a hip, broken teeth, temporary blindness.
This has been highlighted over the past year as I’ve thrown an already genetically weak body, a slim, small and somewhat ridiculous figure, into combat sports and by surfing only a spot famous for its collisions and hierarchal breakdown.
Driven by ego, position, identity and competition, of the metrics available to the WHOOP user, sleep, strain, recovery, I used only the first two (read “Surf journalist discovers “antipatico” towards fellow surfers key to improved performance!” here).
But what if I leant over to the recovery side of the ledger and trained and surfed only when the meter read green? Might the replenishment of the well mean less pinched nerves, tweaked knees etc?
Four metrics make up your recovery, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, respiratory rate and hours of sleep.
Your score is either green, 67% or above, “body primed to adapt to a larger training load,” yellow, 34% – 66%, “body able to adapt to high training load but might be compromised based on the lower end of the spectrum” or red, 33% and below, real easy to blow out.
I adapted around each colour.
The results were three-fold.
Second, it freed me from the idealogical prison of hard work and put me in a guilt-free and dreamy languor. Less stress.
If green or yellow, which came relatively seldom, I’d surf longer and with more intent, the breaks in getting in the water removing the VAL sourness from my tongue and the growl of violence from my gut. and found a notable improvement in performance.
This is the third benefit of swinging to the rhythm of WHOOP.
Buy your WHOOP here, fifteen percent discount if you use the code BEACHGRIT at checkout.
