The Best Recovery Strategies (learned from 14+ years of coaching)
- Emma O'Toole
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Recovery isn’t a product, it’s a system.
For runners and cyclists over 30, recovery is where the real adaptation happens. In this guide, you’ll learn the four core pillars of recovery: sleep, strength training, nutrition, and progressive planning, and how each one helps you train harder, recover smarter, and build lasting fitness for next year and beyond.
Strength training for runners and cyclists over 30 is a game-changer for performance, resilience, and long-term health.
If you want the full breakdown, check out my Strength Training Over 30 Guides:
TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"Training provides the stimulus, recovery allows the adaptation, adaptation creates fitness."
By Emma O'Toole
Hi everyone,
For over two decades, I’ve been chasing performance.
From school cross-country races and university track sessions to ultra-marathons, international triathlons for Great Britain, pilot riding for British Cycling Paracyclists, and UCI Masters time trials; I’ve spent years exploring what the body can endure.
And in that time, I’ve tested every recovery strategy under the sun:
Ice baths.
Foam rollers.
Dry needling.
Supplements.
Compression boots.
Electric muscle stimulation (TENS).
You name it, I’ve probably tried it.
Some helped, some didn’t, but none of them worked without the fundamentals in place.
For the past 14 years, I’ve been coaching endurance athletes across the world: runners and cyclists over 30 who want to perform at their best, stay healthy, and keep doing what they love for decades to come, not just here and now.
This newsletter, like the free BUILT TO ENDURE App, is dedicated to helping those athletes train smarter, recover better, and build long-term performance and longevity in their sport.
Whether that’s through structured strength work, better fuelling, smarter recovery, or learning how to balance life and training, my goal is to give you the knowledge and tools to stay strong, consistent, and built to endure.
With this in mind then, one of the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that recovery isn’t a product you buy or a single thing that you do; rather, it’s a system.
We can think of it like this:
Training provides the stimulus,
recovery allows the adaptation,
adaptation creates fitness.
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to cover the 4 best recovery strategies for runners and cyclists over 30 that I’ve learned from 14+ years of coaching. These four pillars underpin everything we do at BUILT TO ENDURE. They’re not in order because recovery is systemic, if you scrimp on one, your entire ability to recover suffers.
Sleep
Strength Training
Nutrition
A progressive training plan
1. Sleep: the original recovery strategy
Sleep is the most powerful recovery tool you have, and it’s free.
Once you hit your 30s and beyond, your body’s natural recovery processes start to slow. Growth hormone production declines, stress loads from work and life increases, and sleep often becomes the first thing sacrificed.
Yet, sleep matters most.
During deep sleep, your body releases growth hormone, repairs tissues, restores glycogen, and resets your nervous system. It’s where true recovery (adaptation) happens.
Research shows that athletes who consistently sleep longer and better perform better, get injured less, and recover faster. Even mild sleep restriction reduces power output and slows repair.
So before spending £1000 on recovery boots, try adding 30 minutes more sleep this week. That single habit will pay off more than any gadget.
Practical takeaways:
Aim for 7–9 hours a night.
Keep sleep/wake times consistent.
Create a bedtime routine: dim lights, reduce screen time,
Add in breathing exercises
In the BUILT TO ENDURE App:
Inside the Wellness Space, you’ll find tools to improve deep sleep, regulate breathing, and build evening routines that actually support recovery, like journalling.
2. Strength Training: restore, rebuild, recover
Most runners and cyclists treat strength training as an “add on.” However, if you do it properly, it’s one of the most effective recovery tools you have… and this is often one of the most overlooked benefits of consistent strength training.
This is because “joint position dictates muscle function”.
If your hips, back, or shoulders are chronically out of their neutral range, which is common for cyclists and anyone spending long hours at a desk, your muscles can become less efficient at contracting and relaxing. Over time, that leads to compensation patterns, tightness, and reduced movement quality.
Add to that the fact that once we hit 30, we begin losing muscle mass at around 3-5% per decade, with the rate accelerating after 60. That decline affects joint stability, movement quality, and your ability to recover from training.
Strength training helps reverse that. It restores homeostasis, bringing joints back into alignment so muscles can do their job efficiently. That means less wasted energy, better force transfer, and faster recovery.
Heavy and explosive strength training has been shown to improve not just power, but fatigue resistance, joint control, and injury resilience in both runners and cyclists.
This is something I’ve explored and taught extensively as an NSCA-approved course author for strength training in endurance sports, seeing first-hand how structured strength work transforms not just performance, but recovery itself.
Practical takeaways:
Train patterns, not muscles: hinge, squat, press, push, pull, rotary stability.
Use full-range movement to restore joint function.
Target neglected muscle groups, glutes, hamstrings, calves core (anything between your neck, elbows and knees).
In the BUILT TO ENDURE App:
Explore free and premium strength training programmes specifically designed for runners and cyclists over 30, built to complement your endurance training and performance and enhance your recovery from the inside out.
3. Nutrition: refuel, repair, rehydrate
Nutrition is recovery, it’s where you replace what you’ve used and rebuild what you’ve broken down.
For athletes over 30, nutrition becomes even more critical. Hormonal changes make it harder to maintain muscle and recover from high training loads. Your metabolism adapts, but your fuelling strategy often hasn’t (especially if you’re still eating like your 25-year-old self).
Endurance work drains glycogen and stresses muscle tissue. If you don’t refuel correctly, you’ll feel flat and under-recovered no matter how much you sleep.
The science is clear:
Carbohydrates replenish glycogen and are essential to endurance performance.
Protein repairs muscle.
Electrolytes restore imbalances and help with hydration.
Practical takeaways:
Carbs + protein ideally within 30-60 minutes of training.
Aim to spread protein intake evenly across meals.
Don’t under-fuel on rest days.
In the BUILT TO ENDURE App:
Head to the Recipe hub for training and recovery-focused meal ideas each with full macros. These recipes have been designed with the support of a sports dietitian and focus on optimising your endurance performance and maintain muscle mass as you age- my favourite is the post-workout smoothie.
4. Progressive Training Plan: stress, recover, adapt
The final piece is your training plan itself because no gadget or ice bath will fix a poor training plan.
If your plan isn’t progressive, balanced and doesn’t include rest itself then you are not allowing your body the chance to recover and ultimately adapt.
For runners and cyclists over 30, recovery time often needs to be planned thoroughly into your training week, from a balanced training plan that includes a variety of training stimulus (hard and easy!) to planned rest days. Your body still adapts brilliantly, it just needs the right stimulus and the time to do so. Trying to train like you did in your twenties often leads to stagnation or injury.
Performance is created in the balance between load and recovery, not in endless hard sessions. Every fitness increase you make: strength, power, resilience, happens after stress, not during it.
So rest isn’t being “lazy”, it’s how you adapt.
Practical takeaways:
Include at least one genuine rest or low-load day each week.
Deload every 3-4 weeks to consolidate fitness.
Monitor fatigue markers: mood, motivation to train, sleep quality, resting heart rate, performance trends.
In the BUILT TO ENDURE App:
You’ll find progressive training plans with recovery phases built in across both endurance and strength training. These have been designed for runners and cyclists over 30 who want to keep training hard while giving their bodies what they actually need to adapt.
There are also educational courses, like Training Zones: EXPLAINED to help you understand how to optimise your training and take control of it.
Sleep, strength, nutrition and structure.
They’re not as glamorous as some of the recovery tools out there, but they’re a lot cheaper and more accessible for you. Ultimately though, they’re the difference between short-term performance and long-term progress.
Get them right and you won’t be struggling through the week tired and under-performing.
That’s what the BUILT TO ENDURE App was designed around helping you connect the dots between training, recovery, and education.
Recovery = adaptation.
So this week, my challenge to you is to pick one of the four pillars and focus on it fully.
Maybe that’s adding 30 minutes of sleep.
Maybe it’s fuelling properly post-run/ride.
Maybe it’s finally scheduling that strength session you’ve been avoiding.
Maybe that’s adding a rest day to your week and sticking to it.
Whatever you choose, remember that the the best recovery plan isn’t separate from your training plan, it is your training plan.
Also, it’s November! (how did that happen?), and we’re well and truly into the depth of autumn with winter around the corner. I hope your training’s going well and you’re busy making race or event plans for 2026, I’d love to hear them please either reply to this email or jump into our wonderful free community of everyday runners and cyclists over 30, just like you for support and inspiration!
Have a great day!
Thank you!
Emma x
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