Anke’s non-recovering holiday

Two weeks ago, I went to Spain with the “UHO”, an orchestra of approximately 100 university students.

Every year, we give concerts abroad. Besides rehearsing and playing concerts, we also do a lot of activities.

Holiday will recover my body and soul, no?

As the group consists of almost 60 people, we travel together by coach. Sitting for hours in a coach is not something I look forward to. After some time, I don’t really know anymore how to sit in a comfortable way and time passes by slowly. During the night, I try to catch some sleep, but it isn’t that much of a success.

For me, it didn’t feel like a good night’s rest, however Mindstretch showed me different results than I had expected. The two nights I spent on the bus – on the way to Spain and back – only showed green recovery peaks. These were the best nights of the whole trip so I concluded that, knowing that nothing would happen at night, my body and mind considered this excellent time for serious rest. All the other nights had some orange or were even completely orange. Below, you will discover why.

Consuming or creating energy

When 60 students are going on holiday together, I can assure you that it is a lot of fun. We did some excursions during the day like visiting windmills in Consuegra, a guided tour through Salamanca, wine-tasting in La Mancha and many more. We also did more adventurous activities such as paintball and a dead ride in Urda. I definitely had a great time.

But one specific event had a big impact on my monitoring results. Students tend to go to parties in the evening/night and on holiday this is not any different. Dancing together, socializing with friends and having some drinks are things I enjoy doing as well. However, as this takes away a lot of energy, it was clearly visible in my monitoring results. Even my nights were orange as alcohol affects sleep quality. And on top of this, the orange peaks continued the next day due to the fact that – as a result of bad recovery – each activity asked more energy than it would have taken normally.

This way, I created a vicious circle which could have become problematic if the situation would have lasted for a longer period of time.

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