Message from the USOC’s Director of Coaching and Sport Sciences
by Peter Davis, Ph.D.

At the Olympic Training Centers, we provide service to elite athletes and coaches on a daily basis. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to optimize performance. Over the years I have seen a lot of athletes train and compete—and have successes and disappointments. I can’t remember where I first heard the following quote, but after coaching and watching many, many athletes I have come to the belief—“that it’s not always how hard you train that makes a difference—it’s how well you recover.

At the USOC Division of Coaching and Sport Sciences, we believe that recovery/regeneration is a critical element of performance so we decided to focus our attention on this important area in this edition of Olympic Coach.


Dr. Michael Kellman is a well-known and much published author in this area and is presenting some of the topics from his excellent book “Enhancing Recovery” (Human Kinetics). If you would like to further explore this area I recommend that you pick up a copy of the book—details are provided in his article.

Angie Calder, previously from the Australian Institute of Sport, but now with the University of Canberra can always be relied on to give coaches and athletes practical solutions to enhance recovery. She hasn’t let us down for this edition and gives some very useful modalities that can be incorporated into your training and recovery program.

Dr. Mike Stone and Meg Stone along with Dr. Kirsten Peterson from the USOC Division of Coaching and Sport Sciences are providing us an interesting perspective of how training and over-training, and recovery and under-recovery fit together. Both of these articles emphasize common themes (also mentioned by Angie Calder.) Athletes need to track their training—how can you know what to change if you don’t know what you did?

Dr. Peterson raises some interesting points that are worth repeating. Talk to your athletes; observe (and ask them) “How are you doing?” … and actually listen to their response! There are lots of complex scientific tools out there that we think indicate over-training and under-recovery--- but sometimes simple questions and insightful observations can tell us so much more.

Dr. Peterson also points out that recovery strategies should be built into workout schedules up front—not as an after thought when things start to go wrong. Most coaches are really expert at writing complex workouts that fit into all sorts of micro-cycles and macro-cycles (see the article by Mike and Meg Stone)—but not many write a schedule that describes the workout to be accomplished and the recovery strategy to be followed afterwards. This should be common practice.

At the USOC we are actively pursuing this concept and are working on guidelines to assist coaches in this area in the future.

We hope you get as much out of this edition of Olympic Coach as we did putting it together. Remember the benefits of any training session don’t always occur during the session--- they start to occur after it has stopped. What you do between each training session determines how well you can train and/or compete in the next session (s). This goes for your physical, mental, nutritional and spiritual capacities.