The 24/48/72 Hour Rule — Immediate, Delayed, and Cumulative Training Effects
Workouts damage the body. You don’t get better during a workout, but afterwards, in the recovery period following it.
Training results in 3 different types of effects:
Immediate (acute) effects
Delayed effects
Cumulative effects
The immediate effect of training is breakdown, the destruction of enzymatic and structural proteins in the body.
The delayed effects are a rebuilding, or resynthesis of the enzymatic and structural proteins. This is due to the phenomenon of super-compensation.
The cumulative effects are the overall changes that are realized. This depends not solely on the sum of training, but depends on the sequence of training and recovery activities in a workout, from session to session, and from one block of training to another.
The understanding of this sequence of training effects is what the popular Stress + Rest = Growth equation is based on.
The most common mistake made by overly enthusiastic athletes and coaches is not fully appreciating the immediate (acute) effects of training. When you do a hard workout of any kind, you’re purposely breaking yourself down. The severity of the breakdown then influences the duration and depth of recovery needed to benefit from your labor. Provided the period of recuperation is adequate, the body rebuilds and overcompensates to a more robust level than before the stressful event.
This is the most important connection: Stress and rest are a couple.
Like day and night, awake and asleep, ying and yang. Pairing one without the other is to flirt with disaster.
All stress and little rest invites overtraining syndrome, burnout, or injury. All rest and little stress can result in being overweight, developing cardiovascular disease, and possibly inviting premature death.
Good training is about balance and understanding the relationship of stress and rest. Here’s my rule of thumb I call the 24/48/72 Rule:
Moderate training stresses take about 24 hours for the body to repair and rebound from.
Hard training stressors take about 48 hours.
Very difficult stressors, about 72 hours — sometimes longer.
If an athlete is having trouble bouncing back after a 72 hour recovery period either one (or a combo of the following is true): the training stressors experienced were too hard for the athlete, the activities in the recovery period were not easy enough, or the athlete’s self care (hydration, nutrition, or sleep hygiene) was insufficient.
One of our jobs as coaches is to plan and predict how strenuous our athletes will interpret training sessions. My athletes enjoyed successful development and racing results when this was done well. When I did a poor job planning and anticipating their response, their development and results suffered.
Bowerman’s hard/easy approach is correct. Periods of difficult work need to be followed by periods of restoration. But there are shades of hard and easy. The harder the hard efforts are on the athlete, the longer and easier the corresponding easy period should be.
What Bowerman meant when he said, “Train, don’t strain” is to respect the stress/recovery relationship. “The idea that the harder you work, the better you get is just garbage. The greatest improvement is made by the man who works most intelligently.”
Bowerman understood clearly the way to get better was respect the stress/recovery relationship. Oregon runners would often do a “Bear Workout” up to 25 miles of hard running, spread over two to three sessions in a single day, once every 3-4 weeks in the fall. It’s a similar stimulus to Canova’s famous “block” workout days.
The following 2-3 days would be rest or light jogging.
Bowerman understood the rules of intelligent training and respected them. Hopefully, if you hadn’t before, now you will too.