Elite athletes train nearly every component of performance — strength, speed, endurance,
technique and focus. Recovery has become increasingly sophisticated too: sleep, nutrition and
training load are tracked with remarkable precision.
Yet our understanding of what needs to recover is still expanding. Physical restoration is
essential, but recovery is not a single process moving on a single timeline.
Research reflects that complexity. Reviews of post-match recovery have found that performance,
biochemical markers and other measures can return to baseline at different rates — in some
cases, performance measures have returned to baseline while underlying markers of muscle
recovery remain altered. Research tracking stress and recovery has similarly found that
psychological and physiological states can follow different trajectories over time.
In other words, an athlete can look recovered by one measure and still be recovering by another.
That raises a broader question: What actually needs to recover before an athlete is truly ready to
perform again?
Sports science is already beginning to broaden that picture. Mindfulness, yoga, somatic and other
mind-body practices are increasingly being studied in competitive sport not simply as ways to
relax, but in connection with attention, stress regulation, psychological flexibility and
performance.
A meta-analysis of 12 randomized trials involving more than 600 elite athletes found
mindfulness-based programs associated with significant reductions in anxiety and stress and
improvements in psychological well-being, although researchers noted substantial variation
across studies. A 2024 meta-analysis covering 582 athletes also found improvements in
performance and reductions in competitive anxiety following mindfulness training.
More interesting still is the emerging connection with recovery itself. In one study of NCAA
Division I athletes, days that included mindfulness practice were associated with higher reported
energy, muscle readiness and readiness to train the following day.
The direction is promising. But these practices may be pieces of something larger.
Most people already recognize the phenomenon on a smaller scale. A stressful meeting ends, but
ten minutes later you are still having the conversation in your head. Your shoulders remain tense.
You replay what was said, think about what you should have said, and your body seems to have
missed the memo that the meeting is over.
Now amplify that experience by the intensity of elite competition.
Recovery does not happen in separate compartments. What happens in the body affects attention
and emotional state; what happens mentally can influence physiological arousal. The relevant
question may therefore be less about which new recovery tool to add and more about how these
processes can be addressed as parts of the same system.
Years of working with people who operate under sustained physical and mental demand made
this gap increasingly visible to me. Individual practices could address different parts of recovery,
but what I found myself looking for was a practical way to connect them into a more complete
approach.
That observation shaped the development of the Somatic Reset Method™ — an approach
integrating movement, autonomic regulation, attention, interoception and emotional processing.
It sits within a broader shift across performance and sports science toward understanding how
these interacting processes influence a person’s ability to return to readiness.
The next evolution in athletic recovery may therefore be less about adding another tool and more
about changing the model itself. Sleep, nutrition and physical restoration remain fundamental.
Athletes do not perform as a collection of separate systems — and they do not recover that way
either.
They have become extraordinarily precise in how they prepare for performance. The next step
may be bringing that same intelligence to what happens afterward: not simply stopping the
effort, but restoring the whole system that produced it.
Iuliia Chukh
Developer of the Somatic Reset Method™ | Somatic Practitioner
