Why four things, and why in this order
Recovery has become a marketing category. Sleeves, guns, plunges, powders, rings. Almost all of it is arguing over the last two percent while people skip the first ninety. On the floor at CrossFit BC, the members who recover well are not the ones with the most kit. They are the ones who drink, eat, and sleep like it is part of training, because it is.
The four R's are a coaching checklist, not a law of physics. They are ordered by how quickly each one bites. Fluid loss affects you within the hour. Fuel affects your next session. Protein affects the week. Sleep affects everything, which is exactly why it goes last on the list and first on your priorities.
- Rehydrate: replace what you sweated out, with the salt that went with it.
- Refuel: put carbohydrate back so the next session has something to run on.
- Repair: protein across the day so the tissue you stressed can rebuild.
- Rest: sleep, and the quieter hours around it.
Rehydrate: replace the fluid, and the salt with it
Sweat is not just water. It carries sodium, and if you replace the water without the salt you can end up drinking a lot and still feeling flat. Position stands on fluid replacement suggest drinking roughly 125 to 150 percent of the body mass you lost, spread over the hours after training rather than forced down in one go, and including sodium when losses have been heavy.
You do not need a lab for this. Weigh yourself before and after a hard session once or twice, in similar conditions, and you will learn your own rough sweat rate. Most people are surprised, in both directions.
The detail, including what to actually drink and when electrolytes are worth it, is in rehydration after training.
Refuel: carbohydrate, and how urgent it really is
Hard conditioning work draws down muscle glycogen. Putting it back is what makes tomorrow feel normal instead of heavy. How fast you need to do that depends entirely on when you train next.
| Next session | How urgent | What that looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Under 8 hours | Urgent | Reviews of carbohydrate for training recommend roughly 1.0 to 1.2 g per kg per hour in the early hours after, in easily digested forms. |
| Tomorrow | Not urgent | A normal meal with a decent serving of carbohydrate, eaten whenever you would normally eat. |
| Two or more days | Barely relevant | Eat well across the days. Nothing special is required in the hour after. |
Most people at CFBC are in row two, which is the quiet good news. More on the carbohydrate question, and on the famous window, in what to eat after a workout.
Repair: protein across the day
This is where most of the gains sit, and where most of the confusion sits too. A large meta-analysis of protein supplementation and resistance training found benefits that levelled off around 1.6 g of protein per kg of body weight per day, with wide individual variation. For an 80 kg person that is roughly 128 g a day.
The shape matters more than the timing. Spreading that across three or four meals gives the body repeated signals to build, and it is far easier to actually eat than one enormous protein-heavy dinner.
Targets, per-meal dosing and where supplements genuinely help are covered in protein for muscle repair.
Rest: the lever nobody wants to hear about
Expert consensus work on sleep in athletes points to the same unglamorous conclusion year after year: sleep duration and regularity are strongly associated with performance, injury risk and mood, and athletes routinely get less than they need. No supplement in the shop competes with an extra forty minutes a night.
The practical version is not a protocol. It is a bedtime you keep on weekdays, a caffeine cut-off, and not doing your hardest session at 8pm if you struggle to switch off afterwards.
The evening side of this, including pre-sleep eating and the caffeine timing research, is in sleep and pre-sleep nutrition.
What you can safely ignore
A short list, offered gently, because some of these are enjoyable and there is nothing wrong with enjoying them. Just do not mistake them for the job.
- Soreness as a scorecard. Being sore tells you a stimulus was novel, not that it was productive.
- Chasing a perfect readiness score. Useful as a trend, distracting as a daily verdict.
- Anything that promises to replace sleep.
- Very expensive recovery hardware bought before the basics are stable.
Nobody has ever needed a cold plunge more than they needed to go to bed.
Putting it together in a real training week
The four R's are easy to agree with and easy to ignore, because a training week is messy. Work runs late, the 6am is the only class you can make, and the weekend does what it likes.
If you train HYROX or CrossFit with us and want the practical layout, session by session, read recovery in a HYROX training week.
And if you would rather stop guessing about your own numbers, our Performance Lab testing gives you a real starting point instead of an internet average.
