These days, it’s no secret that sleep is important for almost every area of health, fitness, and performance. Sleep tech has become a multi-billion dollar business. There are endless trackers and new devices popping up all the time.

All of this has certainly increased general awareness of the need to get enough sleep.

…But after looking at sleep data from thousands of people who’ve connected their favorite wearables to Morpheus, it’s clear that there’s a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

Despite people knowing how important sleep is, it’s still often the biggest thing limiting their recovery. To understand why, it’s important to know how the two are connected.

Sleep and hormones

The reason sleep is so important when it comes to fitness is because when you’re asleep, your body is shifted into a parasympathetic state. This is particularly the case during the 3 stages of non-REM (NREM) sleep.

Remember, when your body is in a parasympathetic state, it’s driving energy into repairing and remodeling tissues to make them more fit. This process is inherently anabolic, meaning it’s building your body up rather than breaking it down.

The problem is that when you don’t get enough high-quality sleep, it does more than just deprive your body of recovery throughout the night. It impacts your recovery throughout the next day as well.

That’s because lack of sleep can throw off your circadian rhythm, increase your heart rate and decrease your HRV.

That means not only is your body spending fewer hours driving energy towards recovery, it’s shifted into a more catabolic state where it’s breaking tissues down.

You’ll see decreased levels of anabolic hormones—like growth hormone and testosterone—that drive recovery, and increased levels of catabolic hormones—like cortisol.

This is not a good recipe for recovery.

The end result is that you’re much more likely to lose muscle, particularly if you’re burning a lot of calories throughout the day and/or dieting to try and drop fat.

You can see the impact of sleep on body composition directly by looking at the results of a research study on the effects of sleep on dieting.

The researchers looked at total weight loss as well and where that weight loss came from, as well as how much sleep the participants got. They segmented people by those who averaged 5.5 hours of sleep and those that got at least 8.5 hours.

As you can see, there was very little difference in the total amount of total weight both groups lost. That’s not surprising because the caloric deficit was the same across everyone in the study.

There was a huge difference, however, in where that weight came from.

Those with less sleep ended up losing almost entirely muscle mass and very little fat. The group with more sleep still lost muscle, but it was less than half of the muscle lost by the low-sleep group.

The reason this happened is because insufficient sleep inherently decreases energy spent on recovery and muscle building and shifts it to breaking down muscle to use for energy. If you’re trying to improve your fitness, this is the exact opposite of what you want to happen.

The bottom line is that consistently undersleeping leads to negative changes in body composition, increases your risk of injury, and shifts your brain to want to eat more and move less.

Not good.

Fix your bedroom

If you live an average lifespan and get roughly 8 hours of sleep per night, you’ll spend about 229,961 hours in your bedroom. That’s a lot of time in one room and why it’s the most important room in your house.

If you haven’t optimized your bedroom for sleep, you’re missing a huge piece of the recovery puzzle. If you’re still sleeping on an old mattress, the same pillow you’ve had for 5 years, and your room is bright and loud, it’s time to do something about it.

Think about how much money you spend on your phone, computer, TV, etc. None of those things will improve your recovery to drive your health, fitness, and performance. Investing in your bedroom environment will.

Follow these four principles of bedroom design and your body will thank you for it:

• Make it dark. Use blackout blinds or use a high-quality face mask
• Make it quiet. Soundproof your room, and/or use a white noise machine
• Make it comfortable. Get the most comfortable bed and bedding that you can afford. It will pay off
• Make it cold. Sleeping hot is not a good recipe for recovery. Keep your room cool and sink into higher-quality sleep

Fix your caffeine habit

In moderation, and at the right times, caffeine is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s even been shown to have some performance-enhancing benefits in certain uses.

Where things often go wrong, however, is when moderation turns to excess and it’s used to get through the day. This usually translates into having some form of caffeinated drink too close to when you sleep.

Most people probably know that taking a stimulant right before bedtime, or even 3 hours before, isn’t great for sleep.

What most people don’t realize, however, is that taking caffeine 6 full hours away from when you plan to sleep can still have a dramatic impact on both how much sleep you get and the quality of that sleep.

Take a look at the results of the research below. 400mg of caffeine consumed 6 hours before bed reduced sleep by 41 minutes (Drake et al, 2013). And here’s the worst part: people in the study reported feeling no effects of the caffeine when they went to bed.

This is what makes caffeine and stimulants such a problem. It often doesn’t feel like they’re impacting your sleep, but they are.

To maximize your recovery, avoid caffeine and other stimulants as far away from bedtime as possible. You might not immediately notice it’s making a difference in your sleep, but over time, your results and your recovery score will show that it is.

Fix your training

Sleep and training can work together to maximize your recovery and drive results, or they can compound to have the opposite effect.

As we’ve talked about in previous lessons, stress, whether it’s physical or mental, shifts the body into a sympathetic, fight or flight state. If you chronically overload your body with stress, it can have a big impact on your ability to fall asleep.

Impaired sleep is one of the first signs that your body isn’t recovering fast enough from your training. Not getting enough sleep then slows down recovery even more and amplifies the stress of training.

If you don’t adjust your training and get your sleep back on track, it can quickly lead to a downward spiral in your recovery.

Fortunately, Morpheus can help you prevent this from happening.

First, if you’re using a sleep tracker, chances are, you can connect it to Morpheus in the tracking settings.

If you don’t see it listed in the settings, choose “Apple Health” (iPhone) or “Google Fit” (Android). Your device likely shares your sleep data with those platforms and Morpheus can import it from there.

This will help you see the connection between sleep, HRV, and recovery.

When sleep does drag down your recovery, keeping it from progressing into spiral by training smarter is easy with Morpheus:

• Train in the right zone. Because Morpheus adjusts your zones based on your recovery, you’ll be less likely to continue to overload your body if you stick to the guidelines in the last lesson on Morpheus heart rate zones.
• Be mindful of the impact of high intensity strength work. Strength work above 90% of your max puts the body under a ton of stress and drives it into a very sympathetic state. Any time you see your recovery below 80%, be mindful that this type of lifting will have an even bigger impact on your body. It doesn’t mean you can’tlift heavy, it just means it’s better for your recovery to limit the total number of reps.
• Incorporate rebound/recovery workouts on a consistent basis.One of the easiest ways to balance your training intensities is to incorporate at least 1 recovery workout for every high intensity training session you do. This simple strategy will greatly reduce the chances of your training having a negative impact on your sleep.
• Incorporate a cooldown at the end of every workout. Another simple way to prevent your training from keeping you up at night, particularly if you train in the evenings, is doing a cooldown at the end of each workout. You can follow the recovery workout guidelines in previous lessons and apply them to any time of training. This helps shift your body out of the sympathetic fight or flight state towards the recovery side.

Action step

To perform well throughout the rest of the challenge, you’re going to have to consistently get enough sleep. You’ll earn 10 points for each night you get more than 8 hours, 5 points for 7-8 hours, and you’ll lose 5 points if you sleep less than 6.

If getting enough sleep is difficult for you, start by fixing the most common problems listed above and tracking the results in Morpheus. Whatever your goals are, sleep is a key to reaching them. Putting in the work to fix your sleep is always worth the effort.

One of the most important things Morpheus enables you to do is train in heart zones based on your recovery each day. The three Morpheus zones are based on a concept called dynamic heart rate training.

The biggest problem with the way heart training has traditionally been done is that the zones are entirely static. They never change and are only based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that most people use the 220-age formula to determine their max heart rate.

That formula is outdated and research has shown it to be extremely inaccurate for most people. That’s because it was developed more than 50 years ago without any real research to even support it at the time.

It was also never intended to be applied across all ages and fitness levels in the first place.

The other big issue with the traditional approach to heart rate training is that even if you do use an accurate max heart rate, there is no connection to recovery. Your zones are always the same.

It doesn’t matter how fatigued or recovered you are.

The zones are the same either way, but that’s not how the body works.

Think about lifting weights. When you’re tired and sore, the bar feels heavier. It takes much more effort to get in the same number of reps. You can’t hit the same max numbers.

As we’ve discussed in previous lessons, fatigue and stress impact our bodies in many ways.

One of the most important of these is that they increase the cost of doing more work. This often decreases our ability to perform as a result.

That’s why heart rate training zones need to be dynamic and adjust to where your body is at each day.

How the Morpheus heart rate zones work

The Morpheus heart rate zones can help you improve your fitness faster because they are:

• Built around your recovery and adjust to your body on a daily basis. Not on static zones that never change.
• Take into account your overall fitness level and adapt as you get more fit.
• Use the latest science to estimate your max heart rate and update as you train so they’re accurate..
• Are designed to help you improve your recovery and conditioning without leading to overtraining

To make the zones as accurate as possible, you will need to do two things when you set up the Morpheus app.

First, select your fitness level between low, moderate, and high. You can always go back into the settings in the app at any time and change these fitness levels as necessary.

• Low – You have not been training recently and/or are just starting out.
• Moderate – You train recreationally a few times a week, but know you still have a lot of room to improve your overall fitness.
• High – You consistently workout 5-6 days a week and have a resting heart rate in the 50s and/or HRV in the 80s.

Second, if you know your max heart rate and/or anaerobic threshold from specific testing you’ve done, you can enter them into the app.

If you don’t, then you can start by letting Morpheus estimate your max heart rate based on the most recent and well-validated formula that it uses. If you achieve a heart rate higher than this during a workout, Morpheus will automatically adjust this for you.

Once you’ve completed these two steps, you’re ready to start getting in your zone.

Note that if you do not take a recovery score for the day, you will still see the colored zones. Instead of being dynamic based on your recovery, they will be set at your baseline levels derived from your fitness level and max heart rate.

The blue zone

The Morpheus blue zone is the low-to-moderate intensity zone and it’s designed to help you speed up recovery in two effective ways.

The first is through the recovery workouts we covered yesterday. Doing this type of training, with 30-45 minute workouts in your blue zone, will help drive blood flow and speed up recovery.

The second is that consistently training in the blue zone over time can help increase your average HRV and improve your body’s ability to adapt to all kinds of stress. That’s because training at lower and moderate intensities develops the aerobic system in some important ways that higher intensities do not.

The truth about intensity and fitness is you don’t need only low or only high intensity. There are unique benefits to different intensities. Your training should incorporate the full range of intensities across all three Morpheus zones.

A very general rule of thumb is that if your goal is to increase your aerobic fitness and conditioning, roughly 75-85% of your total training time across each month should be in your blue zone.

The green zone

The Morpheus green zone is a step up in intensity from the blue zone and as such, most workouts will end up with less overall time in it than the blue zone.

When you’re in the green zone, you’re tapping into more muscle fibers than when you’re in the blue zone. This also means you’re also driving much more oxygen throughout the entire body. This is an important part of developing aerobic fitness and why it’s called the conditioning zone.

Towards the middle and top of the green zone, you’ll also start tapping more and more into the anaerobic side of your body’s energy systems.

There are two anaerobic energy pathways that create energy without oxygen. They can produce energy much faster than the aerobic side, but the cost of this is they also lead to fatigue much faster as well.

The higher up you go in the green zone, the more you’ll be tapping into the anaerobic side. This will make it more and more difficult to keep going without hitting a wall and gassing out.

When you do higher intensity workouts, you should generally shoot for anywhere from 20-40% of the total workout time in the green zone.

Because your workouts should be a balance of higher and lower intensities, your overall weekly and monthly time in green should end up around 15-25% of the total time.

The red zone

The Morpheus red zone is the highest intensity and puts your body under the most stress. This is why it’s called the overload zone.

It puts the body under maximum load and taxes the aerobic system to its limits, while also pulling in energy from the anaerobic side as well.

This is important to drive your fitness to the highest levels, but the key is to be careful to not spend so much time in your red zone that your recovery suffers.

Because the intensity is at the highest levels, you generally don’t need more than a few minutes of time within the red zone in a workout to see the benefits. You also don’t need to drive your heart rate all the way up to the red zone every workout, either.

Depending on your fitness level, anywhere from 1-3 workouts per week with time in the red zone is all that’s needed. Averaged across a week or month, generally no more than roughly 8-10% of your total training time needs to be in your red zone to see continued results.

Action step

If you haven’t had a chance to put the Morpheus heart rate zones to the test yet, do a warmup and then spend 2 minutes in your blue zone, 2 minutes in your green zone, and then 2 minutes in your red zone.

This will give you a chance to see how each of the zones feel while you’re training. You can also repeat this on a day when you have a low recovery score to see how the zones dynamically adjust each day to meet you where your body is at.

There are many ways to try and speed up recovery these days, from massage and soft tissue work, to hydrotherapy, meditation, and more.

One thing people almost never consider as a potential recovery tool, however, is a workout.

That’s because when it comes to training, most people think of high intensity, fatigue, and soreness. Working out is a way to get stronger, leaner, faster, etc., but not to recover.

But what if there’s a way to use a workout to get better by speeding up recovery rather than putting the body under more stress?

The story of Rebound Training

The idea of using training to speed up recovery came from two things:

1. Years of working with combat athletes who were doing strength and conditioning in the morning and skill training in the evening. I needed to train them in the morning without leaving them too fatigued to perform their second workout.
2. Research done by the military on elite special forces units that measured changes in HRV during periods of extremely stressful training. They found that people whose HRV went up as soon as the stress was over, indicating a shift towards recovery, were the ones who were able to make it through training.

Over time, I experimented with a wide variety of training methods to try and speed up recovery. With enough trial, error and data analysis, I eventually came up with a specific workout strategy that I called Rebound Training.

When it’s incorporated into a weekly training program, Rebound Training has a ton of benefits. It:

• Helps shift the body into a “recovery state” where the body becomes more parasympathetic and HRV is driven up.
• Stimulates blood flow into every muscle fiber without providing too much additional stress that’ll slow recovery down rather than speed it up.
• Develops the metabolic systems that drive recovery — so that someone’s overall ability to tolerate and handle the stress of life  improves.
• Improves breathing and movement quality in a way that can reduce joint stress and help avoid unnecessary increases in stress hormones.
• Doesn’t take too much time. Working on recovery shouldn’t be boring or take as long as a normal workout. I designed the workouts to be no more than 30-45 minutes.
• Makes you feel better. After a Rebound Training session, you should leave the gym feeling better than when you walked in.

Rebound Training with Morpheus

One of the great things about recovery workouts is that there are virtually endless ways to do them. They are also convenient because they don’t take much time and they don’t require any sort of specialized equipment.

The key is to just follow three basic principles:

1. Keep the workout short. No more than 45 minutes. I’ve found that 25-35 total minutes from start to finish tends to be the sweet spot for most people
2. Stay in the blue zone.The blue zone in Morpheus is called the recovery zone for a reason. This is the right level of intensity to promote recovery, so you’ll want the majority of the workout to be in the blue. You’ll also need to keep your average heart rate over 100bpm. Going for a walk can be good for staying active and will increase your step count, but a recovery workout is about more than just taking steps.
3. Use a variety of movements. In order to drive blood flow into as many muscle groups as possible, it’s beneficial to include a variety of movement patterns.

If you have an area that’s particularly sore from a previous workout, spend extra time doing exercises using those muscles to drive blood flow into them and promote recovery.

Rebound Training Template

As long as you follow the principles above, you’ll be on the right track to speed up your recovery in between your more intense training sessions. To make it easier to be consistent and to make the workouts as effective as possible, I typically use a template with the same four components:

Breathe and mobilize (5 min)

I like to start most workouts with a few minutes of breathing drills and mobility exercises. These can help develop and reinforce healthier breathing patterns while supporting better mobility.

There is a wide variety of types of breathing you can do, but if you’re just starting out and want an easy one, give box breathing a try.

To do it, inhale slowly through the nose for 4-5 seconds. Next, hold your breath for 4-5 seconds before exhaling through your mouth for 4-5 seconds. Finish that cycle with another breath hold for 4-5 seconds before repeating.

After a minute or two of doing breathwork, move on to 2-3 of your favorite mobility drills to finish the warm up.

Recovery zone training (15-20 min)

After the warm up, it’s time to get in the blue zone and ramp your heart rate up. There are a couple of ways you can do this.

The first is simply doing a circuit of a few different exercises. I like to use 3-5 exercises for 60-90 seconds each while keeping heart rates relatively constant when moving from one exercise to another.

The second method is doing what I call high/low intervals in the blue zone.

Here, you’ll keep your heart rate in the middle of the blue for 60 seconds, then drive it up to the top of the blue for 60 seconds, and repeat.

You can choose to switch exercises after each round, or you can do a few rounds in a row with one exercise before moving on. It’s generally valuable to incorporate 3-5 different exercises into the recovery zone training time.

This will help drive blood flow to as many different muscles and tissues as possible.

Strength stimulation (5-10 min)

Once you’ve finished your time in the recovery zone, adding in a couple of strength exercises is optional, but it can help drive blood flow into the bigger, stronger, fast-twitch muscle fibers.

These fibers normally don’t get worked much at lower intensities.

The key is to keep the volume low. No more than 2-3 working sets of a single total body exercise like deadlifts, squats, or even explosive movements like box jumps.

If you don’t have any equipment, exercises like bodyweight jump squats and explosive push ups can do the trick.

You can do the strength exercises at higher intensities, but keep the volume limited to no more than 8-10 total reps across the 2-3 sets. This will ensure you speed up recovery instead of slow it down.

4. Recovery cool-down (3-5 min)

The last and final component of a recovery workout is spending a few minutes driving your heart rate as low as possible. Your goal should be to get it within 5-10 bpm of your morning resting HR as quickly as possible.

The easiest way to do this is to lay on the ground and focus on breathing and relaxing. The more you practice dropping your heart rate quickly, the better you’ll get at it.

Once your heart rate is down, finish off with any type of soft tissue work that you enjoy. There are a huge variety of tools available today that can be used for this purpose. The end of a recovery workout is a great time to use them.

Earning points with recovery workouts

Throughout the challenge, you can earn points for up to 3 recovery workouts per week. You’ll get a baseline of 10 points for completing the workout, plus bonus points based on how much your recovery score increases in Morpheus as a result.

If you follow the guidelines above, you should see your recovery score increase 3-5% on average. This lets you know that you’ve spent the right amount of time at the right intensity to speed up recovery.

If you see a smaller increase, or none at all, it means you probably went too hard and/or trained for too long.

Remember, everything comes down to energy. If you end up burning too many calories or adding too much stress, it defeats the purpose of doing a recovery workout.

When it comes to recovery, less is often more.

Action step

As a general rule of thumb, I encourage you to do one recovery workout 12-24 hours after every high intensity workout.

Doing this consistently can make a huge difference in the results you see and your ability to continue training hard without hitting plateaus or risking injury.

Over the weekend, get in at least 1 recovery workout. If you’re on IG, make sure to share the workout and tag Morpheus when your recovery score goes up! @trainwithmorpheus

Over the last few years, heart rate variability, or HRV, has become a widely used metric across a variety of fitness apps. It’s also at the heart of how Morpheus calculates your recovery score.

But what is HRV? Why does it matter?

The easiest answer is that when we measure HRV on a daily basis, it’s a noninvasive measure of how much energy your body has been spending on recovery.

Because of this, it gives us a window into the physiological cost of all the stress your body has been under recently.

When we look at HRV over the long run, the baseline HRV number is a powerful gauge of your body’s resilience against stress – both physical and mental.

People with higher average HRV tend to have greater life expectancy, lower overall disease risk, higher cardiovascular fitness, and even better self-restraint.

To understand why that is, we have to look deeper at how HRV is connected directly to recovery.

Why your heart does not work like a metronome

It’s easy to confuse heart rate with heart rate variability, but they are two very different things.

Each minute, the average person’s heart beats somewhere between 60 and 100 times.

People with higher levels or cardiovascular fitness often have resting heart rates well below that range. Of course, you can see what yours is in Morpheus.

Resting heart rate is a good gauge of general fitness, but on a daily basis, it doesn’t tell us much about recovery.

For that, instead of measuring the amount of times the heart beats in a minute, we have to look deeper.

Measuring HRV starts with accurate detection of the exact time between each heartbeat.

This is called the R-R interval.

If your heart worked like a metronome, then the R-R interval would always be the same between each heartbeat. The human body is much more complicated than that, however.

Instead, your heart rate is influenced by many different factors and it’s constantly changing. When you’re moving around and/or training, your heart rate increases as the need for oxygen to drive aerobic energy production increases.

The body’s stress response system that we discussed in earlier lessons is largely responsible for how this works.

At rest, however, the need for energy isn’t constantly changing. In this case, it’s the system that drives energy into recovery and adaptation, the parasympathetic nervous system, that plays the biggest role in controlling your heart rate.

When it fires, it causes the heart rate to slow down. At rest, it’s constantly firing, but it does so in a pulsatile pattern that has a natural variability to it.

This is much different than the constant rate of a metronome.

The result is that the stronger your parasympathetic nervous system fires, the more variable the time between heart beats becomes. This is where the variability in heart rate variability comes from.

Higher HRV means the parasympathetic nervous system is more active and driving more energy towards recovery, repair, and adaptation.

How HRV changes with stress and recovery

Given what I just said, it might seem like higher HRV is always a good thing and lower HRV is always a bad thing. Unfortunately, this is a common belief, but the truth isn’t quite that simple.

We can see why by looking at a typical pattern of HRV in response to a single period of high stress, followed by 3 days of recovery.

During the period the body is under stress, HRV drops rapidly as the body shifts a large amount of energy towards dealing with whatever the stress is.

In this example, let’s imagine it’s an intense training session. The kind that you know you’re going to feel the next day.

Over the next two days, your body cranks up recovery by shifting more energy to rebuild and remodel all the stressed tissues, restock energy stores, etc. During this time, you’ll typically see a big rise in HRV, often well above where you started.

Exactly how high it goes depends on a variety of factors like how stressful the workout really was. How fit you are. How much you help your body out by getting enough sleep, eating well, managing mental stress, etc.

This is where your lifestyle plays a massive role in either supporting or sabotaging your recovery.

If you don’t do another hard session or put your body under another big period of stress, your HRV will eventually settle back down to your general baseline, i.e. your average HRV range.

Putting it all together

If you look through your HRV numbers in Morpheus, chances are that you’ll be able to find patterns similar to the one above.

Where things get more complicated, however, is when you train hard multiple times a week, often on back to back days. There isn’t enough time to fully recover, so you see the compounding effects of adding stress on top of stress.

When you factor in all the lifestyle pieces that help or hinder recovery, it’s easy to see why HRV being higher or lower on a single day is not always as simple as it’s often made out to be.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist or crunch all the numbers to use HRV.

Morpheus is doing that work for you and looking at the patterns and trends when it calculates the recovery score each day.

HRV plays the biggest role in this calculation because when it’s measured accurately using Morpheus, it’s the single best overall tool we have to gauge the balance between stress and recovery.

Even more, if your goal is to look and feel your best, perform at the highest levels, and increase your healthspan, tracking your average HRV is an incredibly important and powerful way to make sure you’re on the right track.

Action step

Now that you know what to look for, take some time to look through your HRV numbers in Morpheus. See if you can find a hard training session followed by a couple of days of rest, or lower intensity, and see if you can find the pattern shown earlier.

Next, take a look at your HRV patterns across each week. See if you can spot the swings up and down based on your training schedule and lifestyle influences. Now that you know what you’re looking for in your HRV, it should become easier to see the patterns that are driving your daily recovery score.

Recovery has become a buzzword in fitness over the last few years, but what does it really mean?

Does having a higher recovery score mean you can train hard and a lower recovery score means you should stay at home?

Is the best way to recover faster to just rest and get more sleep?

To get to the bottom of what recovery is and how Morpheus works, we have to go back to two things we talked about in yesterday’s lesson: stress and energy.

How the body adapts to stress (and why it’s so important)

At the very heart of fitness (and survival itself) is the concept of adaptability.

In simplest terms, adaptation is the process the body goes through to become more fit to handle the demands of its environment. In the wild, this also means it’s better equipped to survive.

This is how training works.

By lifting weights, doing cardiovascular conditioning, practicing a skill, playing a sport, etc., you are creating a specific environment that your body has to adapt to.

You lift heavy weights, it gets stronger. You run long distances, it gets more efficient. You practice a specific lift or movement, your technique gets better.

This is nothing more than the body’s adaptive mechanisms at work. There are two parts to this process: stress and recovery.

When you’re training, you’re putting your body under stress.

This means your stress-response system is working hard to crank up energy production. The more force and power your muscles produce, the more energy they need.

Once the workout is over, that’s when recovery begins.

The most important thing to understand about recovery is that just like stress, it’s all about energy.

In this case, the body needs energy to repair and rebuild stressed muscle tissue. To add new mitochondria (the power plants of our cells). To create and reinforce the neural pathways that improve our technique and skill.

This use of energy is what we call recovery.

In other words, recovery is the process of using energy to adapt to the stress of our environment.

When it comes to fitness, it’s this process that turns the workouts we do into improvements in strength, power, hypertrophy, body comp, skill, and performance.

The problem with recovery

Your body is constantly through periods where it’s put under stress, followed by time where it can recover from that stress. This is what we call a stress-recovery cycle.

In a perfect world, you’d have all the energy you need to fully recover and adapt to each period of stress.

You’d make constant improvements in your fitness. You’d never feel tired, run down, or lack the motivation to get off the couch. You’d never get sick.

The problem is that we don’t live in that perfect world.

In the real world, our bodies can only produce a fixed amount of energy each day no matter how much we eat or sleep.

The mental stress of life can add up quickly. We can convince ourselves that we need to do one high intensity workout after another.

It can be all too easy to put our body under more mental and physical stress than it has the energy to adapt to. When this happens, we put ourselves into a recovery debt.

If a recovery debt is small, it most often leads to frustrating plateaus where you’re putting in the work, but not seeing any improvement. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of people in fitness get stuck.

Over time, if the balance between stress and recovery isn’t fixed, the body will fight back.

You’ll start to feel more fatigued all the time. You’ll be less motivated to go to the gym and more likely to get injured if you do. You’ll crave foods you know you shouldn’t eat.

Sound familiar? Almost everyone that’s trained hard has experienced this at one time or another.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to prevent all this…

The Morpheus recovery score

A lot of people have been led to believe that a low recovery score on an app means that their body can’t train hard or perform well.

They are often confused when they get this low recovery score even though they feel just fine. Or, they are surprised when they choose to train hard anyway and then hit a PR.

The reason this happens isn’t necessarily because the recovery score is wrong.

It’s because no matter what anyone tells you, a recovery score is not a predictor of what your body is capable of, or how well it will perform at any given time.

Instead, the most accurate way to understand a recovery score, particularly the one Morpheus gives you, is as a gauge of the balance between the amount of energy you’ve been spending on stress vs. recovery over the last few days (or longer).

If your recovery score is low on a given day, it doesn’t mean that you can’t train hard or put your body under more stress.

It just means that if you do, it’ll take even more energy and even longer to fully recover and adapt to all the stress you’ve been throwing at your body lately.

Getting yourself into debt recovery doesn’t happen in a single day.

It’s when you continue to add stress on top of stress, without allowing enough time and energy to go towards recovery, that bad things happen and you pay the price.

When your recovery score is consistently low, it’s a sign that your body has been spending more time and energy dealing with stress than recovering from it.

Because it’s when your body is recovering that gains in fitness are being made, this also means you’re leaving results on the table.

Using the Morpheus recovery score to help guide your training is the key to understanding the difference between what you can do on a given day and what you should do over the long run to reach your goals.

Over the rest of the challenge, you’ll learn more about how all the different areas of life, from sleep, to nutrition, to mental stress, impact the balance between stress and recovery.

Action step

It’s a relatively new idea in the research that our bodies are limited to producing a finite amount of energy in a 24 hour period, but it has profound implications.

The story of how this was discovered is a fascinating one leading back to a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa called the Hadza.

To learn more, look up Dr. Herman Pontzer and read the story of how he developed this new theory called the “Constrained Model of Total Energy Expenditure”

To truly understand fitness, you have to understand the concepts of stress and recovery.

That’s because training is nothing more than a specific type of stress, one that stimulates the body to improve its fitness.

Recovery, on the other hand, is how that improvement in fitness actually happens.

On the surface, getting in better shape is easy.

You put the body under stress through training and then allow it to recover and improve. Over and over again.

The reality, however, is that it’s more challenging than it sounds because stress and recovery both come back to the body’s most important resource: energy.

How stress works in the real world

Today, when people hear the word stress, they most often think of the mental side of it.

When we talk about being “stressed out”, it typically means we’re overwhelmed by finances, school, family, and everything that life is throwing at us.

These things certainly can be stressful, but there is much more to stress than just how we feel psychologically.

To truly understand stress, we have to understand how it works physiologically, i.e. within the body itself. This is where energy comes into the picture.

To see what I mean, let’s do an experiment…

Take a minute and use Morpheus to measure your heart rate. You can do this through the TRAIN feature using either the M5 band, or the M7 chest strap.

Once you see your heart rate on the screen, I want you to close your eyes and think of yourself in a situation that you personally find extremely stressful.

Maybe it’s being covered in spiders, or snakes, or speaking in front of hundreds of people, looking over the edge of a cliff, skydiving, etc.

Whatever it is, focus on it for at least 1 minute and then open your eyes and look at your heart rate.

Chances are, your heart rate will be noticeably higher than before. This is because just thinking about something stressful causes your body to activate what’s known as the stress response system.

This is also often referred to as the “fight or flight” system. In biological terms, it’s the sympathetic nervous system.

The connection between stress and energy

The important thing to understand is that when your heart rate is higher, it means your body is producing more energy.

An easy way to think of what stress is, then, is anything that causes our body to increase energy production.

In other words, stress is a reaction by the body that can be caused by something physical, like a workout, or something purely mental, like a phobia or just dealing with life.

In both cases, our body’s stress response system is activated and our heart rate goes up.

The reason this happens is because biologically speaking, our bodies are hardwired to respond to anything in the environment that we find stressful, whether it’s real or imagined, by cranking up energy production.

For animals in the wild, this extra energy can often be the difference between life and death.

Training might not be a matter of survival, but when we’re working out, our bodies need a huge amount of extra energy compared to being at rest or just walking around.

You can see this by looking at how many calories are burned in a hard workout relative to how many your body uses in an entire day.

The reason this is so important when it comes to fitness is because energy is a limited resource.

Our bodies can only produce a finite amount of it each day because it takes time to turn the foods we eat and our bodies energy stores into the ATP molecule our bodies run on.

In tomorrow’s lesson on recovery, we’ll explore how this energy limit is the single biggest reason people fail to reach their fitness goals despite putting in the work.

More importantly, we’ll talk about how you can use Morpheus to make sure recovery doesn’t limit your success.

Action step

To get a better idea of just how stressful mental stress can be, put on either the Morpheus M5 or M7 and try to drive your heart rate as high as possible purely by thinking about something stressful.

At the same time, to get a preview of what we’re going to cover in tomorrow’s lesson, spend a few minutes trying to relax as much as possible and see how much you can drop your heart rate as well.

Welcome to day 1 of the Morpheus 30-day Recovery Challenge.

Now that it’s officially started, let’s talk about how you can get the win!

To get as many points as possible and give yourself the best shot at claiming the top spot, there are 5 things you’ll need to do consistently over the next 30 days:

– Measure your HRV to get a recovery score each day
– Get at least 8 hours of sleep per night
– Be active enough to get 7,000 steps (or more) each day
– Incorporate at least 2-3 recovery workouts into your weekly training
– Complete the daily lesson and apply what you learn

If you do your best to check each of these boxes over the next 30 days, you’ll be on the path to the top.

You can see exactly what you stand in each of these areas by clicking on the “Scoring” tab next to the leaderboard.

The reason you’ll be rewarded with points for each of these is because they are all an incredibly important part of improving your recovery.

You’ll also be able to unlock bonus points by hitting streaks because consistency is a major key to success in fitness and that’s what this challenge is all about.

Our goal is to help you take the next step in your fitness journey by unlocking the power of faster recovery and smarter training.

Over the coming days, you’ll learn a lot more about what recovery really is, how it’s related to stress, and why the 23 hours outside the gym have such a big impact on whether or not you achieve your fitness goals.

By the end of the challenge, whether you win first place or not, you’ll know exactly how to connect all the dots to drive meaningful (and sustainable) improvements in your fitness, health, and performance.

Action step

By completing this lesson, you’ve earned points in the challenge!

To get more, all you have to do is make sure to take an HRV measurement so you can get a recovery score, and then hit at least 7,000 steps a day before getting a good night of sleep.

Finally, before tomorrow’s lesson, your homework is to take a few minutes to write down the answer to two important questions:

1) What is your single biggest fitness goal? In other words, what motivates you to get up, go to the gym, and put in the work day in and day out?

2) What is the main obstacle keeping you from reaching that goal?

Write the answers to these two questions down because we’ll refer back to them as we progress through the daily lessons.