Beyond Your Limits | David Afiouni

And again, though, a lot of what you do is centered around recovery.

And I think, for me, recovery is paramount.

I feel that everything else that we do... we perhaps do more than we should do with recovery.

And I don't like that.

For me, I quickly learned that there's a balance sheet between strain and between adaptation.

And there's a lot of things that take away from that, that you withdraw from your capacity.

If you don't find opportunities, if you don't intentionally activate the biological process of recovery, of adaptation, eventually that balance is going to run out.

And then you end up with injuries, you end up with all sorts of complications, right? So I think you and I, we totally see that and we see eye to eye when it comes to that.

And everything that I do, be it on the longevity side or on the performance side, revolves around the recovery.

There's plenty of information around performance, around testing, etc., but not enough education on recovery and why is it important.

And for a lot of people, and this is the question that I want to get to, for a lot of people, they still don't understand recovery.

In your own words...

How would you describe recovery and what is it exactly? Because we still confuse rest with recovery, right? I'm sure you come across this every day.

So how would you describe what is recovery for the average Joe out there? And then next, just to give you a heads up, I'm going to ask you on your own recovery protocols, like the stuff that you do yourself.

Yes.

Look, the way I define recovery is the act of deliberate daily disciplines of you being able to functionally reset your mechanical being.

Right.

I mean, it's for me.

Every part of my body and every terrain in my body needs to have a way to be able to unload or offload all of that strain that I have caused it.

And it's very mechanical, just like everything in life, right? And so what I spent doing for a long time is I actually did a lot of research before I went to do any of the things I did, whether it's the triple seven, you know, the seven marathons, seven seven days, seven continents or the North Pole Marathon or the Everest Marathon.

I was always researching and I said, how can I prepare my body and my mind to go and do something like that? And recovery was always prevalent because if I actually don't.

recover myself, I'm not going to be able to show up the next day to my training feeling better or be able to brave all of these long distances that I was able to brave.

And by the way, tissue and muscle and all of your body has a memory.

So when you're actually doing all of these things on the mountain, if your body doesn't know recovery properly and your mind doesn't know recovery, then you're not going to be able to reset.

And so this is today in my own language what I've done on recovery.