CASE STUDY: Recovery in real life

by Blakley Fletcher

I had the pleasure of hosting twenty-one high school freshmen at my gym all last week. It was their interim week and these particular fifteen year olds chose ‘Nutrition + CrossFit’ as their week’s course. Love it!

Our plan for each day was simple.  Spend about two hours each day learning fundamental movements and then put them into practice in CrossFit style workouts.  On the last day we would all throw down with an in-house competition to show off all that we had learned.

The week started out great learning the basics: The Air Squat. Rather than rattle through every detail of our fun and successful week… let’s fast forward to RECOVERY IN REAL LIFE. I’ll also add that I coach at and own a CrossFit gym in case you didn’t know.

After a twelve hour day at the gym on Day 1, I could already begin to feel that this was going to be a physically challenging week. I ate a little more food than normal that evening (about 230 additional calories) and was sure to get to bed early.

Tuesday was a repeat of Monday. I wear a device that tracks my activity, recovery, sleep and provides me with a ton of daily information about these subjects. It’s called a Whoop band. At the end of each day you get a “Strain” score from 0-21 to tell you how active you were and at the beginning of each day you get a “Recovery” score from 0-100% that helps you understand how ready you are to take on your day.

THIS was my Strain score by Tuesday night:

Throughout the week I was burning an average of 4200 calories and maintaining a strain of 19+ each day. (keep in mind I am a 135-lb female who normally burns around 2800 calories per day)

I battled the increase of daily strain and calorie burn with more and more food each day coupled with more and more rest each night. By Wednesday I had added around 600 calories to my normal intake and was in bed by 8pm.

My daily schedule was wake at 5am, coach at 6am, lesson plan during breakfast, coach at 9am, students from 10:30-12:30pm, lunch at 1pm, workout at 2pm, evening classes begin at 4:30pm, home around 6:30pm.

For the entire week I was able to maintain my own fitness and keep my normal workout schedule, maintain a high energy level for my own clients, maintain even more energy for the class of twenty-one high schoolers each day and end the week feeling great.

→ The only way I could have accomplished this was through proper nutrition and rest.

The kiddos did amazing in their in-house competition by the way and my husband and I were able to continue with our weekend plans with friends out of town.

The moral of this story is that I could not have made it through this very active week without proper nutrition and rest.

I could feel that my body needed more fuel so I ate more.

I could feel that my body was worn out when I got home so I was sure to get to bed early.

And thanks to my Whoop band I could see the proof in the data I got at the end of the week. I maintained a “Recovery” score above 70% all week and felt amazing in the process.