For most of my life, I treated recovery as the thing you earned. Train hard enough, and you were allowed to rest. Rest before you'd earned it, and you were being lazy. I carried that belief through circus, through dance, through years of lifting, and well into coaching. It took a body that started changing faster than my plans could keep up with to show me how backwards it was.
Recovery isn't the reward for training. It's part of the training. It's where the adaptation happens.
What recovery does
Every session you do is a stress. Your body responds by repairing and adapting, so that next time the same load costs you a little less. That second part, the adapting, doesn't happen on the hoop. It happens afterwards, while you sleep, eat, move gently and get on with your life.
Sports scientists have a useful way of framing this. A consensus statement from an international group of recovery researchers describes performance as a balance between stress and recovery, and their definition of stress isn't limited to training. It includes everything else life asks of you [1]. Work, travel, caring for people, a bad night's sleep, a stressful week: all of it draws on the same account your training does.
The same group makes another point I come back to often: people respond to training and recovery in different ways, and the same person responds differently from one week to the next [1]. Which means the perfect generic programme doesn't exist. The best plan is the one built around the person in front of you, this week.
Why more isn't the answer
When progress stalls, the instinct is to add. Another session, another conditioning circuit, another set of drills. I've done it myself, and I see it all the time in the aerialists I coach, especially the motivated ones.
But if recovery is where the adaptation happens, then adding load without adding recovery doesn't give you more progress. It gives you more fatigue. You end up training on a tired body, your technique gets sloppier, your sessions feel harder for the same output, and the progress you were chasing moves further away.
This has become real for me through perimenopause. My energy is less predictable than it used to be. Some days I wake up ready for anything. Other days, the same session I'd have breezed through a year ago feels like wading through mud. Pretending every day is the same, and training to a fixed plan regardless, was making me worse, not better.
Not sure whether your week is lopsided? My free Training Balance Wheel shows you where your training, recovery and life load sit right now, so you know what to adjust first.
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Planning around energy, not ambition
So I changed how I plan. Instead of writing my ideal week and forcing myself through it, I start with an honest look at what the week holds.
Here's the structure I use now, for myself and with clients:
Set a theme for the week. One focus, not five. It might be pulling strength, a specific skill, or consistency. A theme keeps you from drifting into doing a bit of everything and progressing at nothing.
Choose your number one goal. If the week falls apart, what's the one thing you want to have done? Protect that first.
Match sessions to your capacity. Look at your work, your commitments and how you're feeling. Put your demanding sessions on the days you're most likely to have energy, and lighter work on the days you know will be stretched.
Schedule recovery like a session. Not as an afterthought, not as the thing you do if there's time. It goes in the plan, with the same weight as your training.
Log how it went. Not to judge yourself, but to see patterns. After a few weeks, you'll notice which days you reliably have energy, what drains you, and what helps you bounce back.
I built my Aerial Weekly Planner around exactly this: a weekly theme, your number one goal, your training focus, and space to log both your sessions and your recovery.
My recovery toolkit
I want to be honest about this section, because recovery tools are an area where marketing runs well ahead of evidence.
Here's what's in my own routine at the moment: a TENS machine, a spiky mat, compression, massage, wooden massage tools and scrapers, and a foot bath at the end of a long day. I also look after my skin more than I used to, which is less about performance and more about making the routine something I look forward to.
Do these tools change recovery dramatically? The research is more modest than the adverts. A meta-analysis of foam rolling, one of the most studied self-massage tools, found its effects on recovery were small and partly negligible, though it did slightly reduce how sore people felt [2]. The authors concluded it's better supported as a warm-up than as a recovery tool.
I find that useful rather than disappointing. It tells me these tools are not doing the heavy lifting. Sleep, food, a sensible load and time are doing the heavy lifting. What my tools do is help me feel better, wind down, and notice my body. That has value, as long as I don't confuse it with the main event.
Ten minutes a day
The habit that has made the biggest difference to me this year is the smallest one. I give myself ten minutes of movement almost every day.
Not a full session. Ten minutes. Some days it's mobility. Some days it's a few strength drills, a walk, or moving through whatever feels tight. On a good day, ten minutes often turns into more. On a hard day, ten minutes is enough, and it still counts.
There's emerging research behind the idea that small doses add up. Researchers studying what they call exercise snacks, short bouts of activity, often a minute or less, spread through the day, suggest they're a feasible and well-tolerated way to build fitness and offset long periods of sitting, though they're clear the evidence so far comes from small studies [3]. I don't need it to be a miracle. I need it to be something I'll do on the days I don't feel like doing anything, and ten minutes is.
What this looks like in practice
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: a sustainable week isn't the one where you do the most. It's the one you can repeat.
Plan around the energy you have, not the energy you wish you had. Protect your one priority. Put recovery in the diary. Keep a small daily habit that survives a bad week. And look back every so often to see what's working, so the next week is built on evidence, not guilt.
Recovery isn't you stepping away from your training. It's you making sure the training you've already done can land.
Where to go from here
Inside the Aerial Performance Lab, this is how we train: structured sessions built around where you are, with recovery treated as part of the programme rather than something you squeeze in. You can try it free first.
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And if you'd like a plan built entirely around your body, your schedule and your energy, I have a small number of 1:1 coaching spaces open, online and a few in person in London.
References
[1] Kellmann, M., Bertollo, M., Bosquet, L., Brink, M., Coutts, A.J., Duffield, R., et al. (2018). Recovery and Performance in Sport: Consensus Statement. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 13(2), 240-245. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2017-0759
[2] Wiewelhove, T., Döweling, A., Schneider, C., Hottenrott, L., Meyer, T., Kellmann, M., Pfeiffer, M., & Ferrauti, A. (2019). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Foam Rolling on Performance and Recovery. Frontiers in Physiology, 10, 376. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00376
[3] Islam, H., Gibala, M.J., & Little, J.P. (2022). Exercise Snacks: A Novel Strategy to Improve Cardiometabolic Health. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 50(1), 31-37. https://doi.org/10.1249/JES.0000000000000275
