Why Recovery Becomes Everything in CrossFit After 35

The older I get, the more I realize fitness isn’t just about output anymore. It’s about how well you can recover from it.

The Question I Keep Getting Asked

Lately, I’ve had a few people ask me some version of:

“How are you still improving at 40?”

Which honestly feels strange considering I’m also the type of person who now spends an unreasonable amount of time flossing my knees before training. And yes, I mean compression bands — not the dance popularized by Russell Horning, famously known as “The Backpack Kid,” back in August of 2016.

Anyway, there’s a completely unnecessary detail for your day.

But after this year’s Open season — where I had some of the best competitive results of my career so far — the question started coming up a little more often.

I qualified for both Age Group Semifinals and overall Open Semifinals for the first time, and out of roughly 22,000 men in my age group who started the Open, I’m currently 98th worldwide.

Which feels cool.

And also mildly concerning considering how emotionally attached I’ve become to recovery tools.

But honestly, I don’t think the answer was simply doing more.

If anything, I think the answer was learning how to train in a way I could consistently recover from.

Not softer.

Not easier.

Just more intelligently.

Which is why a recent WOD Science study immediately caught my attention. If you know me at all, you already know I’m a sucker for these kinds of studies.

Because the findings lined up almost perfectly with what I’ve learned over the years of training, coaching, competing, and trying to stay healthy enough to keep doing all three.

The WOD Science Study

The study followed trained masters functional fitness athletes over an 11-week period — including a full pre- and post-testing week on either end of 9 weeks of structured training — and these weren't beginners finding their footing. Participants averaged 8 to 9 years of CrossFit experience and were already training around 6 hours per week before the study began. In other words, these were real, experienced athletes — not lab beginners seeing first-year gains. And they still improved 6.5% across all performance tests.

The study split athletes into two groups:

High Frequency Group

• trained 6 days per week

• shorter sessions (~45–60 minutes)

• roughly ~24 hours between training exposures

Low Frequency Group

• trained 3 days per week

• longer sessions (~90 minutes)

• roughly ~48-72 hours between training exposures

But here’s the important part that social media tends to completely butcher:

Total training load was equated between groups.

Meaning:

the lower-frequency group wasn’t simply “doing less.”

Researchers balanced overall workload through:

• session duration

• internal load monitoring

• RPE-based intensity prescription

• accumulated weekly stress

In practical terms, the 3-day athletes trained fewer times per week, but each session carried more total workload and physiological stress to keep overall weekly demands similar.

This was NOT:

• “easy training vs hard training”

• “less training vs more training”

• or “just train less and magically recover better”

Both groups still trained hard enough to create adaptation.

The difference was how stress and recovery were distributed across the week.

And honestly, that’s probably the single most important takeaway in the entire study.

The researchers ultimately suggested that training frequency itself appeared less important than how overall stress and recovery were managed across the week.

Which honestly feels a lot more useful than the internet version of:

“Train less, recover more.”

What They Actually Measured

This wasn’t just researchers asking:

“So… vibes good?”

The study looked at:

• aerobic capacity and VO2-related performance

• maximal strength

• power output

• mixed modal conditioning

• gymnastics endurance

• fatigue accumulation

• readiness and recovery perception — tracked weekly using the Hooper questionnaire, a simple evidence-based check-in measuring fatigue, sleep quality, muscle soreness, and mental readiness

• autonomic recovery markers like HRV (heart rate variability)

One test in particular stood out as a reliable long-term fitness marker — the functional ramp test. Row, burpees, and thrusters in a repeating structure that increases in difficulty each round until you can't sustain it. Simple, brutal, and honest. I'll come back to this.

In other words:

they weren’t just testing whether athletes survived training.

They were testing whether athletes were actually adapting from it.

And after 11 weeks?

Both groups improved significantly.

Strength improved.

Conditioning improved.

Gymnastics endurance improved.

Mixed modal performance improved.

And maybe most interestingly:

recovery improved too.

That part matters.

Because a lot of people treat recovery like the thing that happens between training.

But the study suggests recovery capacity itself may actually improve when training stress is managed appropriately.

That’s a pretty important distinction for masters athletes.

One thing worth calling out specifically: strength was the slowest thing to move — improving only 2 to 5% across the board. But that was true for everyone, including athletes with nearly a decade of training experience. If your lifts feel like they're crawling while your conditioning keeps jumping — that's not a you problem. That's just how strength works at this level.

“Recovery isn’t separate from performance anymore. Recovery IS performance.”

The Dangerous Middle Ground

One of the things this study reinforced for me is that a lot of athletes unknowingly live in a dangerous middle ground.

Every session is:

• kinda hard

• kinda intense

• kinda recovered from

…but nothing is truly hard enough to drive major adaptation, and nothing is controlled enough to allow full recovery either.

Over time, that’s usually where people plateau, burn out, or start collecting mobility tools like Infinity Stones.

The higher-frequency group in the study couldn’t simply redline six days per week forever, or recovery would eventually collapse.

At the same time, the lower-frequency group couldn’t casually cruise through three sessions and expect meaningful progress either.

Intensity still mattered.

Load still mattered.

Stimulus still mattered.

The difference was intentional effort distribution.

Hard days needed to be hard enough to create adaptation.

Lower-stress days needed to remain controlled enough to allow recovery.

That’s the nuance most people miss.

“If every day is maximal effort, eventually nothing is.”

Recovery Becomes Performance

One thing I think gets misunderstood in CrossFit is that at the highest level, the sport isn’t just about who is the strongest or fittest anymore.

It’s about who can recover the fastest.

At the CrossFit Games level, athletes may have to perform 10–12 events over the course of 3–4 days.

By that point, everyone is already elite.

The separator becomes:

• who can continue producing output under accumulated fatigue

• who can recover between events

• who can restore fuel and nervous system readiness

• who can maintain movement quality while exhausted

• who can manage stress accumulation over multiple days

Recovery becomes part of the competitive skill set itself.

And honestly, the same principle applies at the affiliate level too.

No, most people reading this aren’t doing 12 events in a weekend.

But many ARE:

• training 4–6 days per week

• working full-time

• sleeping inconsistently

• raising kids

• managing stress

• trying to improve performance

• and still wanting to stay healthy long-term

Recovery still becomes one of the biggest variables determining whether adaptation continues happening.

Especially after 35.

Why We Program Differently At PUSH

This is also a big part of why we program the way we do at PUSH.

There’s intention behind the flow of the week.

Not every day needs to feel like a final exam.

That also doesn’t mean every day should feel easy.

This is where context matters.

If we absolutely bury people with something nasty — like a brutal six-round row, bench, toes-to-bar, push-up workout that has half the gym lying on the floor reconsidering their life choices afterward and personally messaging me later that night — there’s probably a reason the next day isn’t another redline sprint into oblivion.

You don’t adapt from intensity alone.

You adapt from recovering from intensity.

Recovery doesn’t mean avoiding hard training.

It means creating enough space to actually adapt from hard training.

So yes, sometimes the next training day may “only” be:

• heavy lifting

• positional work

• aerobic pacing

• lower-volume training

• skill development

That’s intentional.

Because if every day is maximal effort, eventually nothing is.

Your body stops adapting.

Your joints start negotiating against you.

And your nervous system quietly files for divorce.

At the same time, the opposite mistake happens too.

If you’re somebody who only trains three days per week, that doesn’t mean casually floating through every session either.

Effort still matters.

Stimulus still matters.

If you show up on a lower-conditioning day or a “pick your effort” style session — like the 1 minute on / 30 seconds off HYROX workout we just did — then you may actually need to push intensity or loading harder to create enough training stimulus for adaptation.

That’s the nuance.

The goal isn’t:

“always go hard.”

And it’s not:

“always take it easy.”

The goal is understanding where intensity belongs within the bigger picture of recovery and progression.

The Real Long Game

I think this is also where CrossFit sometimes gets unfairly criticized.

People will say:

“CrossFit hurts people.”

But usually what they really mean is:

“poor load management hurts people.”

Because intensity itself isn’t inherently bad.

Unmanaged intensity is.

There’s a massive difference between:

• training hard

  and

• training recklessly

And somewhere along the way, a lot of people started confusing the two.

The older I get, the less interested I am in proving how much punishment I can survive for one training cycle.

I’m more interested in whether I can still be adapting at 50.

Because honestly, that’s what this Open season felt like for me.

Not one magical breakthrough.

Not one heroic cycle.

Just years of:

• smarter recovery

• better consistency

• more intentional intensity

• fewer unnecessary redlines

• and continuing to stay healthy enough to keep putting one marble in the jar at a time

At PUSH, we’re far more interested in building athletes who can train consistently for years than athletes who can survive one heroic month of intensity.

The functional ramp test is a good example of what objective progress tracking looks like. Every 3 to 4 months, that kind of benchmark tells you more about where you're at than how you felt on any given Tuesday.

Because for masters athletes, longevity isn’t separate from performance anymore.

It IS the performance.

Stay Dope.

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