Supercompensation: Why a Break in Your Training Is Necessary

Perhaps it is because of an injury, maybe work is extra busy, or family commitments pile up. Perhaps it’s an illness or any number of other life events that causes you to take a break from your fitness routine. Let’s face it, no matter who you are, life happens.

Those accidental and out-of-our-control breaks aside, what I want to focus on is those times when you actually know a time-out is coming. The break in your training is actually on your calendar and is completely within your control. Those are the breaks that—if prepared for correctly—can actually help your fitness rather than hurt it. 

For example, I just returned from traveling to Bermuda to report on a WTS (World Triathlon Series) race. I knew well ahead of time that I wouldn’t have the time, the gear, or perhaps even the inclination to continue with my normal fitness regimen while I was there, so I prepared myself for the break. How did I do that exactly? I will get into that in a moment, but first, let’s talk about how our bodies typically handle breaks in training.

Regularly Scheduled Mini-Breaks

Doing too much, at too high intensity, for too long can potentially lead to things like injury, depression, fatigue, and eventually poor performance in your chosen sport.

One reason I often build mini-breaks into the plans of the athletes that I coach is to avoid overtraining. Doing too much, at too high intensity, for too long can potentially lead to things like injury, depression, fatigue, and eventually poor performance in your chosen sport. Taking a break (or even just a “reboot week”) can help them recover and come back ready to rock again. And no, that time away from serious training doesn’t have to hurt the gains that they have made. For more info on that, check out the article called Why Training Time-outs Can Be Positive.

Often, it is helpful for us avid movers to take days off to get rid of the fatigue that accumulates in our body. After all, that is how fitness is built—stress and rest. You can’t have one without the other.

How Long Does It Take to Lose Fitness?

In the article called How Fast Do You Get Out of Shape? you can learn about a study that showed conditioned athletes, who had been training regularly for at least a year and then suddenly stopped, lost about half of their aerobic conditioning in three months. There is also research that shows beginner exercisers, who have worked out for about two months, experience a complete loss of all aerobic conditioning after two months of not working out. So all in all, the losses are not that fast, even if you are a beginner.

Then new research highlighted in an article from Outside Magazine explained that you should never, ever stop training for more than two weeks if you can help it. I probably don’t need to tell you that research turned some heads.

In the article, the researchers explain how when you first start working out, you get strong very quickly with just a few sessions because at this stage your muscles aren’t very big. These gains happen primarily due to a neuromuscular adaptation, not a musculoskeletal adaptation. Basically, this means that before your muscles even start to get bigger or thicker, your brain gets better at communicating with your muscles and recruiting more of them to do its bidding. 

On the other hand, when it comes to endurance training, you experience primarily an increase in your plasma and blood volume, which is why, a few weeks into an endurance training program, your heart rate won’t spike as high as it did when you first started training. You also get better at shedding off body heat via sweating, and better at utilizing fatty acids as a fuel.

In the article, the researcher explains that if you keep up your strength training, you'll gain muscle mass and strength and if you keep up your endurance training, after six months, it’s possible to increase blood volume by as much as 27 percent.

You can roughly expect it to take twice as long to get back into shape as the time you’ve spent being inactive.

That all sounds good, right? Well sadly, the researchers go on to say that all of these benefits can disappear if you stop training for approximately 10-14 days. At that time, your maximum oxygen utilization drops at a rate of about 0.5% a day. Beyond a two week break, your brain’s ability to recruit muscle drops by 1-5%. After three to four weeks, your muscles begin to atrophy, your fatty acid utilization drops and you become more sensitive to fluctuations in blood sugar.

In the end, the researcher says that you can roughly expect it to take twice as long to get back into shape as the time you’ve spent being inactive. So, for example, if you take two weeks off, it could take four weeks to build back up to your previous fitness. But, as we talked about earlier, if you’re already fit with a good training history, the time it takes to regain fitness can definitely be shortened. And that time off can also be used to our advantage through something called supercompensation.

Supercompensation is defined in sports science theory as the post-training period during which the trained function/parameter has a higher performance capacity than it did prior to the training period. It is how we get ourselves to that state which is our focus for today.

Overreaching and Overtraining

The most common source of stress that we active folks experience is called “cumulative microtrauma.” This is basically the accumulated cell damage brought on by all those repeated exercise sessions. When you combine that stress with all the other of life’s stressors (work, family, money, school, relationships, etc) you can put your body into one of two states:

1. Overreaching: An accumulation of training or non-training stress that results in a short-term reduction in performance capacity with or without related physiological and psychological signs and symptoms of overtraining. In this state, restoration of performance capacity can take several days to several weeks.

2. Overtraining: An accumulation of training or non-training stress resulting in a long-term reduction in performance capacity with or without related physiological and psychological signs and symptoms of overtraining. In this greater state of stress, restoration of performance capacity may take from several weeks to several months.

If I am really getting into the nitty-gritty (and you know I will), there are actually two types of overreaching: functional and non-functional. Functional overreaching is a state of overreaching or excessive stress from which you can bounce back within about two weeks of appropriate recovery. Non-functional overreaching is when it takes longer than two weeks, and up to six weeks to bounce back.

So, what does this have to do with preparing to take a break in your training? I am glad you asked!

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Purposeful Overreaching

Although it sounds scary, it should not be your goal to avoid overreaching.

At this point I want you to know that although it sounds scary, it should not be your goal to avoid overreaching. When you can recover correctly from all that cellular microtrauma, your body bounces back stronger than ever (remember that fitness is built through stress and rest) and the subsequent fitness gains are actually greater than what they would have been if you had played it safe and not pushed yourself to the edge of overtraining.

And that’s the whole idea in a nutshell, really. Push yourself to the edge (or overreach), and then achieve full recovery to reap the subsequent gain in fitness.

As I said earlier, the nerdy fitness term for this is “supercompensation” and based on this principle, you absolutely must push yourself beyond your limits, occasionally. Take a look at any good training plan (marathon, bodybuilding, or otherwise) and you will see that they have some amount of purposeful accumulation of fatigue followed by a period of recovery that results in supercompensation in an ever-growing escalation of performance and fitness.

It’s often hard to explain this to a new athlete who wants their fitness build to be a straight line with an upward slope directly from the couch to greatness. In reality, it looks a lot more like a mountain range, with many peaks but nearly as many valleys.

Instead of experiencing the losses in fitness, we can actually grow our fitness and strength during the time off.

Planning for a Break

To come full circle back to where we started, when you know you have a break in your training and you will be either forced or voluntarily put into a period of recovery (like I was last week on those Bermudian beaches) we can use this idea of supercompensation to our advantage. Instead of experiencing the losses in fitness that were highlighted in those research studies, we can actually grow our fitness and strength during the time off. This is how to do it:

1. Identify when the break in training is going to happen.

2. In your training plan, two to three weeks before the break, remove your normal rest and recovery days and instead begin a gradual build in your training load. This may include extra kilometers of running or cycling, more weight on the bar, or back to back workouts that would normally be separated by 24 or 48 hours.

3. In the final week before the break, dig deep and feel free to ignore that inner voice of reason which I usually encourage you to heed. Launch yourself out of bed and into your workout clothes despite feeling a desire to hit snooze and call it a rest day knowing that you will soon get all the rest you need.

4. Be careful not to push yourself fully into overtraining but definitely allow yourself to accumulate more fatigue than you usually would. Don’t be unreasonable but also, as we say in the biz, don’t be a wimp.

Here is an interesting study that was published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that serves as a perfect example of supercompensation and recovery. In this study, researchers divided fit triathletes into two groups. Both groups spent one week doing their regular training, but then for the next three weeks, one group continued this regular training, while the other group ramped up their training by 40%. Finally, both groups did what is called a taper (which is a purposeful and gradual decrease in training) for a week before the research culminated in a final performance test.

In the same way that we are planning for that beach vacation, their goal was to push the 40% increase group into a state of functional overreaching. As expected, the performance of the overreaching group got steadily worse over the three hard weeks but then, after the taper, their fitness supercompensated and they had the absolute best results of the study.

So, there we have it. By planning some hard and heavy weeks leading up to a vacation or a break, not only can we avoid detraining, losing fitness, and having to make up for lost time, we can actually increase our fitness as we relax on the beach. With the caveat that this doesn’t give us license to go off the deep end completely. We still need to give our body what it needs to repair and rebuild (general movement, good food, adequate hydration, deep sleep, etc.) What we don’t have to do is pack our kettlebells in our carry-on or set an alarm to get up before dawn to bust out a quick 10k before our loved ones wake up in order to stick to our awesome fitness goals.

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