Besfort Zeneli shares his philosophy about recovery
Besfort Zeneli came through the academy at IF Elfsborg in Borås, where he signed his first professional contract at nineteen and spent four seasons in Allsvenskan. In January 2026 he moved to Royale Union Saint-Gilloise in Belgium and won the Belgian Cup in his first half-season. Besfort has also taken the steps up to become a Sweden international, joining the team at the 2026 World Cup.
We wanted to speak with him about recovery, to learn and understand the routines of a true elite athlete.
What did you think recovery was when you turned professional, and what is it actually?
I thought it was a category of things you do. Ice bath, massage, stretching, protein. A list. And when I hit a stretch where I was doing everything right and still felt like I was running in sand, my response was to add more of the list. More gym, more mobility, more of everything, because if I'm doing it all correctly and it isn't working then obviously I'm not doing enough. That logic feels completely sound at the time.
It took a long time to see that adding was the wrong direction. What I've got now is closer to paying attention — noticing what state I'm actually in rather than ticking boxes and going to bed feeling professional. It's harder work than a list, because you can't finish it.
What does recovery mean to you?
How well I can come down. Everything is stress — a match, a flight, a bad night, other small things in life. The body doesn't separate those. So recovery isn't the ice bath. That's a tool, and players collect tools instead of asking the real question, which is whether they can get back down after being up. Some weeks I do everything correctly and still can't come down. That tells me more than the tools do.
A few years ago I'd have answered this with a list, and I'd have sounded far more certain than I do now. Which is funny, because I knew less.
What's the piece of advice about health you were given early that turned out to be wrong?
That being young means you can get away with it. Sleep when you're older, your body handles anything now. And it isn't quite a lie — I did recover fast, and you can play a good game on four hours of sleep at nineteen and nobody watching would know. Every time you get away with it, it looks like proof.
But you don't feel it in that session. You feel it in the third game of the week in February, when you're fine for sixty minutes and then you're not, and you can't point to anything you did wrong that week. The real cost isn't even physical. It's that you spend years not building the habits, because you never needed them. Then one day you need them and you're starting from nothing.
If someone had sat me down at eighteen and explained all this properly, I'd have nodded and done exactly what I did anyway. Which makes me wonder what I'm getting wrong now that I'll only understand at twenty-eight.
What does an optimal rest day look like?
Boring. If it's interesting, I've done it wrong. Wake up without an alarm, get outside within an hour — light first, not coffee. Then most of the day is nothing. The mistake I made for years was filling the rest day with recovery. Sauna, cold, mobility, stretching. That's not rest, that's training with a nicer name.
Where I lose it is in the evening. I'm good until nine, then I'm on my phone for two hours, and I knew what that was doing and did it anyway. What changed is that I stopped treating it as a willpower problem. I have a phone, we travel constantly. So the question became how do I make the light matter less. That's when I started wearing HEVO in the evenings, around nine, when the lamps come on and the phone comes out.
I noticed it first on the road, which is where I'm worst — bright rooms, late food, finishing a match at eleven with your body still going. What I notice is the wind-down starts earlier. Putting them on became the signal that the day is over, and my body believes the signal. It’s a passive and effective recovery tool. They require no effort but do their job.