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“It just kind of speaks to where we are at as a culture right now that we have to focus on doing nothing and like relaxing. So, the book sort of builds towards creating some sort of like rules for recovery or like concepts. And I think one of the most important things is just having a daily ritual or a part of your every day, that's just relaxation and relaxing. And by that, I mean, you're not trying to be productive. In fact, productivity is sort of the - of it and it's like, you're just sort of being, you're letting your mind wander, and you're letting your muscles, your body relax. But it's almost like these days, people almost feel like they have to pencil that in or not even-- people don't even use pencils anymore. It's like their apps or whatever, they have to have an alert that tells them okay, it's time to relax now and you have exactly 30 minutes to relax. And it’s like--” This episode of the Smart Athlete Podcast is brought to you by Solpri, Skincare for Athletes. Whether you're in the gym, on the mats, on the road or in the pool, we protect your skin so you're more comfortable in your own body. To learn more, go to Solpri.com. JESSE: Welcome to Smart Athlete Podcast. I'm your host, Jesse Funk. Today, my guest started her career as a lab researcher. She's the former lead science writer for 538, currently freelancing. So, feel free to get in touch with her if you need some quality articles. She has a podcast called Emerging Form. It's on creativity, and I'm sure she might share more with us about it in a minute. But more importantly today, we're talking about her latest book, Good to Go. Welcome to the podcast, Christie Aschwanden. I knew I was gonna mess it up Christie, I'm sorry. CHRISTIE: That's pretty good actually. So, in Switzerland, it’s a Swiss name, they say Aschwanden or Aschwanden. And I used to say it Aschwanden but I've sort of developed it to say Ascheanden because when say ash, then people think it's spelled with an O and they really screw up the spelling. But if I just say ash, everyone gets it pretty close. JESSE: Like I told you before we got started, it's just like, half German thing in my head where I go Ashwanden with the v sound. And the ash, I could get it corrected. In the future, I’ll have to ask the next guess and then be like, all right, let me say this three times and then-- CHRISTIE: I feel like sometimes trying to get it right actually makes it worse. And I was on the matebook tour, I was on stage with a friend of mine, we are doing a Q&A and he's great. And I asked him right before I want to be sure I'm saying your last name correctly. And he told me and then I got up there and said it completely wrong. And he was just like, what are you doing? JESSE: Yeah. Well, it’s so funny. So, my last name is Funk. It's four letters, it's a relatively common word. But the most egregious I think was I had Fu-nick. And I went, what? I didn't know what to do. I was a teenager at the time. And I was like, I don't even know what to do with that right now. But as you said, we're kind of short on time today as you're a busy person. So, I kind of want to jump right in and ask you why even take an assignment talking about recovery? I mean, you do a lot of things. So, I mean, why take this assignment at all? CHRISTIE: Yeah, that is such a great question. And it has a kind of a-- I'll give you the long answer. I'll give you the short version of the long answer. The short long answer is that I was an elite athlete for many years and recovery is sort of the thing that I never managed to get right. And it’s something that I think all of us athletes know that it is really important. But it's something that's easy to neglect. And looking back on my career, now that it's over, I realized that was sort of the thing that limited me reaching my peak potential or whatever was just that I was pretty much constantly overtraining, I was neglecting to really focused on recovery. I sort of gave recovery short shrift. I think that's pretty common among athletes, especially endurance athletes like myself who tend to be really driven and sort of had this idea that more is better even if you sort of intellectually know that it's not. So, often the response to like, things not going well or to just work harder and I could see now-- JESSE: Well, we know how to work hard, how do you know that you're recovering hard, recovering effectively, right. CHRISTIE: Right, exactly. So, there's that aspect, but then the other aspect is like, basically so I was like serious athlete in the 90s, and the 2000s and back then we didn't have like, there's so much stuff that has just sprung up since then. And I still do sports, I'm just totally recreational, not really competing. Although I did just take up cyclocross, and I just realized that, oh, crap, it's time to start training and I have my first race in a few weeks, which is super fun. But anyway, in that time, there's been sort of this proliferation of new products and services that are targeted athletes that are all about recovery. And so I say in the book that back in my day, see this makes me seem really old, which I guess I am now. But back in my day recovery, was a noun, it was the state of being that you tried to achieve by like, putting your feet up and resting and sleeping and basically, you weren't doing anything, the whole point of recovery was to do nothing. But now recovery has become a verb. It's something that you do. And I kept hearing in the course of reporting my book, I kept talking to pro athletes and serious athletes who are saying, oh, I gotta go do my recovery now. I'm thinking go do your recovery, that just seems ridiculous, but I started to realize that that's where we're at now. And recovery has become something that people really do with as much sort of energy and vigor as they do their training. Which on the one hand, it's great that there's kind of a wide standing recognition of the importance of recovery. But on the other end of that is sort of like, I also know I'm a science journalist by training. I used to be an experimentalists like a sort of a science geek, a data geek. And the other thing that I noticed is that a lot of this stuff didn't seem very scientific to me. And so I was really interested in sort of like interrogating the science, looking at what this stuff was all about. And yeah, really, I wanted to figure out what works. I was pretty sure that some of this new stuff must be pretty amazing if it had become so popular. JESSE: Yeah. Well, I think you touched on it in the book where it's like we kind of talked about you know how to work hard. So, it's like you need to recover, it's easier to like, let’s do something to recover versus let's do nothing. I think you touched on it, I can’t remember what chapter that is you talked about it. CHRISTIE: Yeah, I think it just kind of speaks to where we are at as a culture right now that we have to focus on doing nothing and like relaxing. So, the book sort of builds towards creating some sort of rules for recovery or concepts. And I think one of the most important things is just having a daily ritual or a part of your every day, that's just relaxation and relaxing. And by that, I mean, you're not trying to be productive. In fact, productivity is sort of the - of it and it's like, you're just sort of being, you're letting your mind wander, and you're letting your muscles, your body relax. But it's almost like these days, people almost feel like they have to pencil that in or not even-- people don't even use pencils anymore. It's like their apps or whatever, they have to have an alert that tells them okay, it's time to relax now and you have exactly 30 minutes to relax. And it’s like-- JESSE: Yeah, you know, actually, I fall into that a little bit where it's like so I bought an old house, it was built in the 1930s and it needs a lot of work. So, my mind is constantly churning all the time, you know, new ad ideas, I need to get new guests or I need to prep for an interview, whatever it is, I need to do like always, always going. And my almost like, penciled in recovery, quote-unquote, to get my mind to shut down is like, all right I need to go sand some paint off a door and I can just be instead of letting my mind-- so it gives my mind a break. But it is scheduled time like I'm going to go do this for an hour. It's still that weird prescribed time that we're in right now. CHRISTIE: Yeah, it's like people feel like they need permission, and it's been really interesting. One of the most common responses that I've gotten to the book, I've gotten so many letters about this is people just telling me oh my God, thank you like, you gave me permission to take time off to just relax and you gave me permission to stop being so anxious and to stop worrying about-- There's a lot of things in the book that I sort of identified as being not worth your time. And I kind of expected that people were going to be mad at me for debunking some of their favorite things and in fact, it's been sort of the opposite. People are like, oh, thank God, I don't have to go on the ice bath anymore. I always hated that. It's like, yeah, you don't actually need to do it. So, people have actually been really happy about that. JESSE: Yeah, I was kind of wondering about that because it seems like as I went through it, it seems like that the vast majority of chapters you're like, no, didn't really have a whole lot of efficacy here. Maybe, in regards to icing, I think you talked about for short term recovery, say like, you've got multiple races a day or something that there might be some efficacious use of ice between, but it inhibits long term recovery. So, it's like, okay, maybe it has some limited use, but it's not a cure all for Whatever we want it to do. CHRISTIE: Yeah, I mean, the secret is there is no secret, right? It's like all the stuff that you know and people, really, and we're just so eager, we're sort of living in this time too where we have such a belief in technology, which I think is cool. But it's also sort of this idea of like there's this perfect version of ourselves, it’s just like one techno fix away. And if only we get the right app, or the right product or whatever, that everything will be perfect. Or even the idea of the one weird trick, it doesn't even necessarily have to be the product, but it's like, okay, do this and it's the ice bath or whatever. And so, I guess one of the messages from my book, no, actually, you don't. Let go of that stuff. If you actually just focus on the basics, the stuff that you sort of already know to be doing, that's where you get the biggest payoffs. And in fact, I think one of the biggest payoffs actually comes from making a conscious decision to not stress about this other stuff, and to not try to micromanage and to sort of stop seeking these tiny little gains, where the sort of effort to attain them sort of erases whatever benefit you're going to get. Because now all of a sudden, yeah, instead of finishing your workout, now you're spending another half hour doing all these things that aren't going to benefit you. Or if they do, it's such a small amount that maybe that half hour would have been better off spent actually relaxing. Because I think if your recovery rituals are not relaxing, then they're not working. But on the other hand, I identify a lot of modalities that actually don't have-- there may be these scientific claims that are made for them that didn't hold up. But at the same time, if they help someone relax, that's actually recovery, recovery should be relaxing, it’s helping your body regenerate, recuperate. And so anything that you can do that makes you feel good, and makes you feel relaxed and sort of helps you reduce stress and feel at ease, like that's really great. And so you don't need some pseudo-scientific explanation about infrared rays or lactic acid flushing or whatever. Massage feels really, really great, you don't have a lot of really good physiological explanations for how it helps. But it helps I think by making people feel really good. It helps by forcing people to lie down and relax for a while. It helps by forcing people to put their legs up and really just sort of focus on their body for a bit. Go to Part 2 Go to Part 3
