Previous installments of “Feel the Burn” can be found here.
Let’s talk a little bit about when you’re not exercising. Maybe that’s today! Maybe it’s been a few weeks. Maybe forever. I, personally, am really in thrall to the idea of systems and resolutions and I’ll-get-in-there-four-days-a-week and by-May-I-should-be-doing-five-pull-ups and things like that, which is so, so detrimental to actually trying to move your body around. I have to work on it, honestly. It’s something I’m bad at.
What happens–and this may sound familiar to some of you–is that you overcommit yourself to whatever it is you’re doing (five days a week in the gym, or never ever eating sugar, or writing for two hours a day, or, I don’t know, putting in a stupid Crest Whitestrip every day for two weeks) and then, when human life interferes and you miss a few days, being unglued by it and proceeding to cease doing whatever the original thing was altogether, because you couldn’t hack it.
So what I try to do, now, which is cheesy but works, is pretend I wake up fresh and momentarily disoriented in the Cylon goo-water every morning (as Lucy Lawless, obvi), which is how seriously nerdy people interpret “one day at a time,” I guess. Having goals, but not timelines, and making those goals reasonable.
“Today, I’ll go for a walk. Here is the playlist I will listen to on my walk.”
“Today, I am going to roast that cauliflower before the little brown spots take over more of its surface area.”
“Today, while watching House of Cards, I’m going to do five Lady pushups whenever Kevin Spacey’s relationship with Kate Mara makes me uncomfortable.”
And then, of course, there is overtraining. This is a real thing, especially when people are beginning to strength train or run. I’ve tried to take up running about twenty-three times, and have realized I just occasionally enjoy leafing through Runner’s World. Each of those twenty-three times, one of these two things happen:
1. I’ve signed up for one of the Couch-to-5K programs, printed out a physical calendar, filled it out dutifully in pen, missed a single run three weeks in, and thrown it in the trash.
2. I’ve signed up for one of the Couch-to-5K programs, decided to double the whatever to get there faster, messed up my IT band, and then not run again for a year.
The latter is overtraining*. And it’s a lot easier to do than you think, especially if you’re just starting out. If you’re a happy Toast reader, and you’re not someone who is particularly active, and then you decide to start going to the gym five days a week to lift weights, taking the weekends off, you could very easily get yourself into a situation where you are overtraining. Make sure you don’t exert the same muscle groups two days in a row. Make sure you’re getting extra sleep, especially if you’re new to working out. Make sure you’re eating enough, because, as we’ve mentioned before, a real recipe for disaster is pushing your body harder than usual while suddenly feeding your body less than usual. I mean, not to get all fake-science on you, but I’m sure 100% of fake-scientists will explain that your body logically interprets that to mean that you are being pursued constantly by tigers and dumps stress everywhere.
Take some time, is what I’m saying. Overtraining will actually not make you stronger, it’ll make you feel crummy and make you more prone to injuries. The buffest guy I know works out like a beast, and then every six weeks he takes a week off from working out altogether, eats like Baron Harkonnen, and then just picks up where he left off.
Better, actually. If you’ve overtrained a bit (I didn’t overtrain, per se, but I worked out strenuously about five times a week instead of three-ish times a week this summer), and you take a break, many many people will find they have two rough workouts when they start up again, but then find they’re at a slightly higher level than they were before. There are those who report “newbie gains,” which is what people call the glorious honeymoon period of exercising before you start hitting some of the limits of your body and cease getting demonstrably better every week, as a result of taking a week to let everything calm down before climbing back on the horse.
I took two and a half weeks off, while I was in Canada with my mom, and didn’t do jack. Last time I was in Canada, I got in the car and drove half an hour to the gym most mornings to work out. It was fun, I enjoyed it. But I was a little physically done by the end of the summer, to be honest, even though it was a great experience and got me to a new personal level of fitness. I had been bulking up, consciously, trying to put on more physical muscle (deltssss), so I was eating like a truck and really pushing myself in the weight room, and my body was starting to say, hey, cool it for a little while, k? So I just…stopped. For two and a half weeks.
And for me, that’s historically been something which would derail me for MONTHS. How could I take two and a half weeks off, and just…walk into a gym? WILL PEOPLE NOT BE ABLE TO TELL THAT I DID NOTHING BUT PLAY WITH MY KID AND BLOG DURING THAT TIME?
No. After two and a half weeks, you can just start moving your body, no one cares except for you. You can start moving your body any time you want. You can start moving a body you’ve never moved before, slowly, and it doesn’t matter. I had a great workout. I went home, I filled in the little gaps I’d just created in my muscles with some protein, and I woke up feeling like a million bucks.
A new day, a new opportunity to spit out the Cylon goo and just live your life, ideally with pushups.
*There are some douche-y meatheads on the internet who will tell you that overtraining is a myth and you are just lazy and need to keep going, but you have my permission to ignore them and listen to your own body. They’re right that you need to make peace with feeling muscle soreness 24-48 hours after a workout, that’s a good kind of soreness, but if you’re feeling tired and rundown and you’re never NOT sore, remember that being fit does not mean feeling like you have mono. Take three days off, eat well and sleep, pick it back up.
