Training Volume, Intensity, and Recovery

Training doesn’t make you better. Recovery from training makes you better. The stimulus happens on the mat. The adaptation happens during sleep, rest, and downtime. Confusing these leads to the paradox of the dedicated practitioner who trains constantly but improves slowly.

Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome describes the pattern: stress produces a temporary performance decrease, followed by supercompensation if recovery is adequate. Skip the recovery and you get cumulative fatigue instead of adaptation. The body doesn’t distinguish between types of stress — work pressure, relationship strain, and training volume all draw from the same recovery capacity.

Volume is total work done: rounds rolled, techniques drilled, minutes of exertion. Intensity is how hard each unit of work is: rolling at competition pace versus flow rolling. Both contribute to training load, but they trade off. High-volume training requires lower intensity; high-intensity training requires lower volume.

Most hobbyists err toward moderate intensity, moderate volume — every session feels similar. This is less effective than polarized training: some sessions should be very easy (drilling, flow), some should be very hard (competition simulation). The middle ground produces the least adaptation.

For grappling, a reasonable heuristic: 80% of training time at low-to-moderate intensity (technique acquisition, positional drilling), 20% at high intensity (live sparring with full resistance). This ratio appears across endurance sports, and the translation to skill sports tracks.

Overreaching is temporary performance decline from accumulated fatigue. It resolves with rest — a week of reduced training restores function and often produces supercompensation. Strategic overreaching is useful: a hard training block followed by a deload week can produce rapid improvement.

Overtraining is different. It’s a clinical syndrome marked by sustained performance decline, sleep disruption, mood disturbance, and elevated resting heart rate. Recovery takes weeks or months. Overtraining results from ignoring overreaching signals — pushing through fatigue that was asking for rest.

Warning signs: declining performance despite increased effort, loss of motivation, chronic soreness, difficulty sleeping despite exhaustion, elevated morning heart rate. Any of these persisting for more than two weeks suggests the need for serious rest, not more training.

Sleep is when motor skill consolidation happens. Research shows that complex motor sequences practiced during the day are “replayed” during REM sleep, strengthening neural pathways. Miss sleep and you miss the adaptation window. Studies on motor learning consistently show that sleep-deprived subjects improve less than rested subjects given identical practice.

The minimum for serious training: seven hours. Eight to nine is better. Sleep quality matters as much as quantity — consistent sleep and wake times, cool temperature, darkness, and caffeine cutoff six hours before bed.

Practitioners often sacrifice sleep to train more. The math doesn’t work. An extra training session costs more in recovery than it produces in stimulus if it comes at the expense of sleep.

Practical load monitoring uses Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). After each session, rate the difficulty from 1 to 10. Multiply by session duration in minutes for session load. Track weekly totals. Increases over 10% per week correlate with injury risk; sustained high loads without recovery correlate with overtraining.

The simple version: after training, ask yourself “how hard was that?” Write down a number. Watch the numbers over weeks. Sharp increases or sustained highs without drops are warnings.

The deepest practitioners understand that rest is part of training. They don’t feel guilty about recovery days. They don’t view deloads as lost time. They recognize that the ceiling on improvement is often set by recovery capacity, not by willingness to work.

Training intelligently means training less sometimes. Progress requires constraint.

Go Deeper

Books

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker — The science of sleep and performance. Persuasive and slightly alarming.
Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden — Rigorous look at recovery methods, separating science from marketing.
Peak by K. Anders Ericsson — Deliberate practice, including discussion of recovery and limits.

Essays

Stephen Seiler’s research on polarized training — The 80/20 model for endurance and skill sport.