The Recovery Ride Conundrum

Good question: Just curious, it seems as though you prefer rest days to be completely off the bike; do you ever have your athletes do recovery rides instead/also? I've found recently that having a week of recovery with only 1 or 2 rides is not working out for me, as it ends up taking a week of riding to get back in the "groove". This week, however, I'm trying out a rest week that involves the same number of rides as usual, but mostly at recovery pace.

The basic goal of a recovery day is to allow your body to heal from the stress you put it through in previous days. If you allow it to recover, you will gain fitness. If you don't, you will remain in a state of fatigue and actually lose fitness. So, what should take place during a recovery day to allow for this fitness boost? Well, there's a bunch of things - quality sleep, good nutrition, hydration, minimizing stress, stretching, and a recovery activity, or active recovery.
Active recovery is a good idea because it increases blood flow throughout your body which moves nutrients around faster and hastens the process of recovery. I consider active recovery to be "walking pace" activity. It can be done on the bike, it can be done on foot.
A lot of this depends on how much free time you have in your day. If you are trading an hour of sleep for an hour recovery spin on the bike, I would say get the extra hour of sleep.
Recovery days are as much a mental rest as a physical one - so I think that it is important sometimes to step away from the bike and think about other things.
So, let's say its the week leading into a big race. I would probably have you on the bike every day - esp as you get closer to the race - as it will keep your legs open. But some of these days might be a 30 minute spin at 15mph or less and the only goal is increase blood flow and get some junk out of your legs.
If you're further out from an important race or important day of training, I prefer rest days that are totally off the bike. Its important to save up as much motivation as possible for the hard days, so if that means staying off the bike on recovery days, then that is the best thing to do. If your hard days are as hard as they should be, you will quickly develop a great appreciation for the rest days.

As you point out though - too many days off the bike leaves you feeling like garbage. So, assuming you are in race season, I would recommend no more than 2 consecutive days off the bike.

My advice would be to remember the goal of recovery days. Putting in an extra hour on a recovery day to bump up your total hours for the week is faulty logic. Quality over quantity - and quality recovery is equally as important quality training. Thanks for the question!