Are You Living It?

It seems the most common pain conditions I see are caused by trying to catch-up on exercise. For a number of reasons people miss, or skip their scheduled exercise routine and then try to make it up as soon as they return to the routine. I just want to remind us all, a few missed days of exercise is not going to make a negative change in our fitness.

Usually, the only draw back to a few missed workouts is a temporary slowing of improvement in the steady gains we are making toward our fitness goals.  For many of us, the few days of extra rest may actually have a more positive benefit than negative impact. Pushing along on that fine line of physiologic stress and response, it is easy to push a bit too hard and not give the body enough time to respond and recover. Remember, stressing the body is the easiest part for any athlete or highly active person. The hard part, is having the patients to allow the body the time it needs to get stronger.

This can be frustrating, as it is not something we have complete control over. We can use recovery techniques and planned rest periods within our training plans to optimize our body’s ability to recover and respond positively, but we can’t actually speed it up. If we remind ourselves of this when we are tempted to push harder in order to catch-up on lost time, we may save ourselves some frustration, and likely prevent an injury that could have a truly negative impact on our fitness. By listening to the body and building a training plan around its capabilities, we can optimize our fitness gains.