For the last few months, I’ve changed the primary focus of my training. Not adding strength. Not getting bigger. Not trimming body fat. I even stopped obsessing about my pressing strength.
I started worrying most about my recovery.
It’s funny: recovering from workouts has been a common theme in my conversations with my clients for years. Whatever you’re aiming for, recovering between workouts is when the good stuff happens. Food, sleep, stress management, water, protein, probiotics, fish oil, foam rolling, meditation. All of these things have the potential to make you stronger: they can help you to recover better from your training sessions.
The big change: I added a new “recovery coach” to my life, and he’s called Morpheus. Not a Matrix reference (although it has been like taking the red pill: a journey into a whole new way of thinking about the world of strength and conditioning).
What have I learned from using Morpheus?
Over the last few months, I’ve paid a lot more attention to non-training stresses:
How much sleep do I get?
What’s the relative quality of my food each day?
How do I subjectively feel when I get up in the morning?
How hard are my workouts, and how well do I perform each day?
More importantly, I’ve learned to focus on one training goal: work hard, and recover harder. Do not allow a lack of recovery to limit the value of the training I do in the gym.
What is Morpheus?
Morpheus is a two-part system: there’s an app for your phone and a heart rate sensor used to take a reading first thing in the morning. To this, I added two more pieces of tech: a Fitbit Charge 2 (for sleep tracking) and a Polar H10 Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitor (used during training). It took me a couple of weeks to get into the habit of using everything regularly, but now it’s easy; all told, it takes about 10 minutes per day. But the value? Priceless.
Here’s what my day looks like (at least as far as Morpheus is concerned).
Wake up. Open the Fitbit app, and sync the sleep data to my phone. This is data point number one: how much sleep did I get. Simply seeing that I sleep 6 hours a lot of nights, and noticing how I feel when I get 8 hours of sleep, has made me look for ways of eeking out a bit more slumber time, more often.
Open the Morpheus app, turn on the Morpheus sensor, and strap it to my forearm. This is one of the fantastic things about Morpheus: the sensor uses light to track heart rate, so it doesn’t need to go around your ribcage like electrode-based sensors. Tell Morpheus to run a 2.5 minute test, and then lay down, relax, and breathe. This 2.5 minutes is actually its own gift: time to be quiet, scan the body and see how everything feels first thing in the morning.
When the test is done, Morpheus asks a handful of questions: what was the quality of your sleep? How sore are you? How do you feel, overall? Morpheus also shows the sleep data from the Fitbit, in case I need to change it. I can also enter it manually, in the rare cases when I forgot to wear the Fitbit to sleep. Side note: I wear the Fitbit all the time, except for training or in the shower. It’s just out of habit – or rather, to ensure I have it on when I go to sleep.
The result: Morpheus gives me a recovery score as a percentage out of 100%. Anything above 80% is a green light to go hard; between 40% and 80%, I pull back on the throttle a bit; below 40%, I take a recovery-only day – easy, low-intensity work and some active, mindful breathing practice.
Then I go about my day. I usually do one long training block in the mid-afternoon, around 3pm. This is usually an hour of strength work and an hour of conditioning, with about 30 minutes between.
When I’m starting my strength workout, I put my Polar H10 on, and tell Morpheus I’m starting a strength training session. Then I do my thing. Squat, press, deadlift, pull-ups, drags, carries, hypertrophy work, etc. When I’m down, I tell Morpheus, who then recalculates my recovery score. A hard session will take it down a few points; an easier session may not change it at all.
Here’s where it really matters: conditioning. The beauty is that Morpheus uses the recovery score to adjust heart rate zones. In other words: if you’ve slept well, eaten well, and have good waking heart rate and heart rate variability scores, your recovery score will be higher, and your heart rate zones will also be higher. If those stress indicators look worse – you’re under-recovered – your heart rate zones will be lower. The goal: train as hard as possible without adding additional stress that you won’t be able to recover from.
Let’s say the workout is burst intervals on the rowing machine. For burst intervals, you’ll set a timer for some duration, say 20 minutes. During that time you’ll row, hard, until your heart rate gets up to a predetermined value (easy formula: [220-Age] x 0.8); once you’re there, you rest until your heart rate comes back down (30 beats below your high number).
Rather than using the numbers from the formula above, I’ll use the zones determined by Morpheus. The result: on days I’m better recovered, I go harder. On days when my sleep was off, I go easier.
There’s one last piece of living with Morpheus: getting into bed, I set my alarm, and then I open the Morpheus app. I estimate the quality of my nutrition over the day, how tired I am, and how many alcoholic drinks I’d had that day. This data is brought into the recovery score the next day.
How do these ideas work without Morpheus?
Great question. Between Morpheus ($150), the Fitbit Charge 2 ($150), and the Polar H10 ($90), this hasn’t been the cheapest way to collect data. What’s your other option? Keep a journal. Every morning, note how long you slept, and how well you slept. Record the duration and intensity of your training sessions, and how well you performed. At night, note how tired you are and how well you ate. A scale from 1-5 for everything will work well enough. And then, when you wake up, take your pulse while you’re still laying down.
And if you want more help figuring out how to put this all into practice, and figuring out the first thing that’ll make a big difference in your training and outcomes, fill out the form below. Let’s talk soon.
-Michael