Back to training: how to know you have recovered

Come back too early and you spend the next camp carrying something. Come back too late and you spend it closing a gap that grew while you were away. Neither decision is made well by feel.

Almost nobody has access to blood markers between fights. So the question is what a fighter can read himself, in a gym, without a lab.

Four things, and none of them is soreness.

Why feeling fine is not evidence

Start with the finding that should end this argument.

In a study of professional rugby union players, around half had not returned to their pre-match jump power at 60 hours.

Half a squad, at two and a half days, most of whom would have told you they felt ready.

In judo athletes, creatine kinase was back to baseline at 48 hours while jump performance behaved on an entirely separate timeline.

Two clocks. The one you can feel is the unreliable one.

The four signals

Output on something you can measure. A jump, a sprint, a lift you know your numbers on. Take a reading before the fight, then again before you return.

If it is meaningfully down, the nervous system has not come back regardless of what the mirror says.

This is the closest a fighter gets to the measurement the studies used, and it costs nothing.

Resting heart rate in the morning. Taken the same way, at the same time, over several days. A figure sitting above your normal is a signal, and it is one of the few that is hard to argue with.

Sleep, unprompted. The signal is whether you are sleeping normally without needing to try. Waking at four for several nights running after a fight is information.

Soreness beyond 72 hours. The acute damage should be resolving by then. Something still sore on day five is either an injury or a level of damage that needs more time, and both answers point the same way.

Coming back too early

The pattern is always the same, and it is rarely stupidity. A short-notice offer arrives, or the gym culture rewards being back on Monday, or the fighter is bored and restless after a week of doing nothing.

What follows is a camp that starts on top of unrepaired damage. Fatigue is a documented mediator of injury susceptibility, and insufficient recovery after competition has been linked both to greater injury risk and to the development of overtraining.

The cost appears in week five, as a niggle that will not settle or an output that stopped moving, long after week one looked fine.

Coming back too late

Less discussed and more common than people admit.

Two weeks of nothing turns into six. Body mass climbs past where it started, which is measured: a professional mixed martial artist tracked to 4.2% above his pre-camp baseline within 2 weeks of competing.

Then the next camp has a bigger job than the last one, the descent has to be more aggressive, and the fighter concludes he is getting older.

He is not. Nobody managed the gap.

What the return should look like

A week where the answer is genuinely nothing. Not light training. Eating, sleeping, walking. This is the repayment of a debt and it is the part most often skipped.

Then movement without damage. Easy aerobic work, mobility, technical work at low intensity. In soccer players, active recovery at 48 hours restored soreness and muscle damage markers better than sport-specific training did, and the same logic holds over a longer window.

Then strength before sparring. Rebuild the structure before you ask it to absorb contact again. The order matters and it usually gets reversed because sparring is what the gym is for.

Then weigh yourself and write the number down. Once, deliberately, at the end of the recovery period. Not to react to it.

To know where the next camp starts from, and to see whether you are inside the 12 to 15% band.

What I would tell a coach

The fighter will want to come back before he should, and he will say he feels good. He will be telling the truth about how he feels and it will not be evidence of anything.

Take one measurement before the fight. Take the same one before he returns. If the number is down, he waits, and the conversation is about a number rather than about how tough he is.

That single habit removes most of the argument, and it takes about 4 minutes.

The line I keep coming back to

Everything in a fighter's year is measured except the parts between the fights, and those are the parts that decide what the fights look like.

Eight weeks get a plan. The 72 hours after get nothing, the following 6 weeks get nothing, and then everyone is surprised that camp seven was harder than camp six.

Connective tissue repairs on a slower clock than muscle, and the one supplement with a loading-dependent case behind it is collagen.

The weeks before this one decide how much there is to rebuild. They are covered in nutrition during injury.