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Real recovery might include fast-food

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In elite sports, we’ve mastered the art of pushing hard. Training with intensity, going deep, breaking limits. But mental recovery? That’s often the neglected child. Even though that’s exactly where growth happens. Not at the peak of exertion, but in the quiet that follows.

For me, recovery isn’t about passively waiting until your energy comes back. It’s an active process. A practice. Just like strength training—only this time, for your mind and nervous system.

In this blog, I’ll share three insights that completely changed my perspective on recovery. And I hope they’ll help you recover with more calm, depth, and clarity—both physically and mentally.

📚 Overview

  • Recovery means processing: learning from what happened
  • Deep relaxation as the foundation for peak performance
  • Mental recovery: from warrior back to human

🧩 Key Takeaways:

  • Recovery is an active form of mental training

  • Meditation helps you process, relax, and let go

  • In silence, your ability to be fully present in sport grows

1. Recovery is processing

In my younger days—when I was still an avid kite-buggy racer—I lived entirely in the flow of sport. Everything was about feeling, experiencing, trying. Before a race, we’d talk with friends, study the track, read the wind. No complex strategies—just go. And most of the time, it worked.

Later, in rowing, I tried to control everything. Planning, visualizing, managing every detail. But that plan didn’t account for my stress levels. When something unexpected happened—cramp, drifting off course—I lost my spontaneity. I got stuck in my head.

The real lesson came when I started meditating. Meditation became my way of processing. Not active analysis, but learning to sit with whatever came up—and letting it go again. By sitting still, I learned to see the weak spots in myself without judgment.

And more importantly: I learned to race like a kid again. Not blindly naïve, but fresh. With a beginner’s mind. Fully in the moment. Because the lesson always comes after the race. During the race, I want to give everything to feeling, reacting, and being fully present.

2. Deep Relaxation Enables Deep Effort

When I started working in professional football as a physical trainer, I encountered something new to me: football humor. Banter, sarcasm, endless coffee breaks. On the surface, it sometimes looked disinterested. But underneath, something essential was happening: relaxation.

In my first year, I worked with a group of players who always went out for dinner together the night before a match. Young and old, relaxed at the table. I wasn’t there as a staff member, but you could feel it the next day. The dressing room was calm. There was laughter, playfulness—and then they fought like animals on the pitch.

We knocked Feyenoord out of the playoffs. Players landed major transfers. And the following year, everything fell apart. The leader was gone. The relaxation was gone. The team fragmented.

That experience taught me that relaxation doesn’t happen by itself. And that recovery is not just an individual task—it often emerges from a collective energy of trust and connection.

Meditation helps me—and now many of the athletes I work with—to consciously train that deep relaxation. Not just through rest, but through awareness. The nervous system downshifts, the breath deepens, and the body recovers. The deeper you can relax, the deeper you’ll be able to go again later.

3. Mental Recovery: Shifting Between Role and Self

What is it about identity? How can something so fluid, transparent, and even temporary become so fixed?

I thought of Ireen Wüst. She recently shared that after major competitions in Heerenveen, she always ordered a frikandel speciaal (a Dutch fast-food snack). What a beautiful image. And how I wish I could’ve stood in line at that snack bar, witnessing the moment the speed skater Ireen simply became Ireen again. Everyone in the room instantly recognized it. That was the moment her story about mental recovery truly came to life.

I’ve known that struggle too. For years, I chased a self-imposed sense of worthiness: only when I achieve this, will I be a “real athlete.” Only then can I call myself a teacher. So I gave it everything. With full conviction, with everything I had inside me.

That drive brought me far. But meditation taught me something I hadn’t found anywhere else: you can only truly let go of a role once you dare to carry it fully. Don’t run from the pressure—feel it completely. Then, fear disappears.

Recovery, for me now, means giving everything when the moment demands it. Holding nothing back, playing no role. And yet—during meditation, later, in the silence—something always comes up to learn from. And that’s a good thing.

Closing – The Power of Silence

Physical and mental recovery go hand in hand. And meditation is the only thing I know that supports both processes at the same time. You process, you relax, you recover—from the inside out.

Want to try it? Get in touch.

Not because you have to perform. But because recovery is a form of training too.
And the true champion knows:

In silence, strength grows.

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