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As a budding amateur or club athlete, it can be hard to know how kind to be to your body. At the end of a testing season of competition and events, it’s important to take time off to allow your muscles and joints to recover from the stresses and strains placed on them. It’s also vital to mentally switch off to ensure you are refreshed and reinvigorated for the start of a new campaign.

In elite sport, you can have too much of a good thing. There are athletics meetings almost every week during the thick of the season and if you include the prospect of a major meeting like an Olympic or Commonwealth Games too, it’s understandable why elite athletes increasingly pick and choose the events they wish to enter.

Premier League footballers have also long complained of the impact of fixture congestion on their bodies and their ability to play at full speed. An academic study into the impact of fixture congestion on performance did indeed confirm that players’ high intensity movements were significantly reduced, even though they managed to cover the same amount of distance over the course of a match.

The best way to develop your own recovery rituals – either after an unwanted injury or a gruelling season – is to learn from those that do it properly. Below, we’ve taken the time to research the post-season rest periods and regimes of some of the most successful athletes in the post-millennium era. Hopefully these examples will help provide some structure to your own recovery period and make you feel less conscious about enjoying downtime with your family and friends.

Usain Bolt

Jamaican sprinting sensation Usain Bolt has been an inspiration to amateur and club-level athletes across the world. Although he is now retired, Bolt’s recovery regime remains a fascination to enthusiasts. Bolt never publicly revealed how much or how often he recovers, but his former coach Glen Mills said in 2010 that Bolt has a minimum of four weeks off to mentally and physically recover. In addition to this, Mills said that if the following season did not include an Olympic Games or a World Championships, Bolt preferred to take up to eight weeks away from the track.

Mo Farah

British long-distance star Mo Farah used to take at least a fortnight off training during the off-season. His former coach Alberto Salazar went into further detail on Farah’s recovery regime back in 2012. Salazar said that he and Farah worked in tandem during “two 20-week cycles”. After each of those cycles, Farah will spend two weeks of “no running whatsoever” followed by “two weeks of jogging”. Salazar described that as four weeks of recovery, followed by another fortnight of “moderate build-up” exercise before going head long into “heavy training”.

Bernard Lagat

Former Kenyan-American middle and long-distance runner Bernard Lagat said in a previous interview with runnersworld that he would stop all forms of training in the off-season for at least five weeks. During which time he would do nothing but “eat and play with [his] children”.

During the same interview, Lagat was quizzed as to why other elite-level athletes are loathe to take such a lengthy time off. Lagat believes it is through “fear” of how they would eventually “feel on that first day back”.

The views of successful marathon coach Renato Canova

It’s also worth noting the views on athlete recovery from world-renowned marathon coach Renato Canova. He has overseen the development of multiple marathon runners that have achieved sub-2:10 runs and his approach to downtime was published on a popular message board called Letsrun.

Canova added that there has never been rules or regimes “valid for all athletes”, but he went on to describe a typical period of “resting” and “transition”. He said the resting period is often brief, followed by a transition that’s “already a period of training”. Canova’s athletes typically concluded their full rest in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, which averaged a fortnight of not undertaking “any physical activity”.

If you’re looking to hone your off-season training program, these case studies should give you the encouragement needed to factor in substantial downtime to take stock and go again for next season.