How to Eat During a Recovery Week

When training volume drops, nutrition still matters. A recovery week is when your body adapts to the work you’ve already done, and the right nutrition helps maximise muscle repair, restoration, and long-term performance gains. This guide explains how to adjust your intake without under-fuelling recovery, and which nutrients best support adaptation.

What Is a Recovery Week?

During longer training blocks, recovery (or deload) weeks are deliberately built in to reduce training load. These periods allow the body to repair and rebuild stronger, helping improve performance while reducing the risk of illness and injury. Although training stress is lower, the physiological processes that drive adaptation are still very active meaning the body still requires fuel to get the most out of a recovery week.

Should I Eat Less?

While mileage and training volume may decrease, energy requirements only reduce slightly. During a recovery week, your body is investing energy into key processes such as muscle protein synthesis, glycogen restoration, connective tissue repair, hormonal rebalancing, and central nervous system recovery. If energy intake drops too far, these processes can be compromised, limiting recovery and blunting the benefits of the reduced training load.

How to Adjust Your Energy Intake

Rather than significantly cutting calories, the goal is to maintain energy availability while adjusting macronutrient balance. With less long endurance training, there is reduced demand for large muscle glycogen stores and intra-session fuelling is often unnecessary. This does not mean removing carbohydrates entirely, but instead scaling intake to session intensity and focusing on carbohydrate quality, prioritising wholegrains, fruits, and vegetables over fast-acting sources.

As carbohydrate intake is adjusted, protein intake can remain high or increase slightly to support tissue repair. Healthy fats can also play a larger role during recovery weeks, particularly as there is less risk of gastrointestinal discomfort during training sessions.

What Should I Eat to Support Recovery and Adaptation?

Protein

Protein is essential during recovery weeks to support muscle repair, tendon and connective tissue recovery, and immune function. Endurance athletes should aim for approximately 1.6–2.2 g/kg body weight per day, spread evenly across meals and snacks. Including a protein source at every meal helps optimise muscle protein synthesis. Good sources include dairy, eggs, meat, fish, soy products, beans, legumes, and protein supplements where appropriate.

Fats

Dietary fats play an important role in hormone production, vitamin absorption, and inflammation regulation. During recovery weeks, prioritise unsaturated fats while limiting excessive saturated fat intake. Foods such as oily fish, olive oil, avocado, nuts, and seeds provide valuable nutrients and can be easily incorporated into meals to support overall recovery.

The key priority during a recovery week is avoiding under-fuelling. While training volume may decrease, your body is still working hard behind the scenes to repair, rebuild, and adapt to the training stress you’ve accumulated. Failing to fuel adequately during this period can limit recovery, blunt performance gains, and leave you underprepared for the next training block, ultimately increasing the risk of burnout and injury.