Exercise is an induced stress that causes your body to change.
The General Adaptation Principle, a concept proposed by Hans Selye in his book, The Stress of Life, states that once a stressor is introduced to your system, your body’s natural response is a cycle of alarm, adaptation and exhaustion.
Every time you exercise, a microdose of muscular damage occurs. Your body scrambles to reinforce muscles, bones, connective tissue, metabolism, and nervous system in order to manage the next bout of exercise (Alarm).
The more you repeat the exercise, the better your body handles the activity (Adaptation).
Continually increasing the frequency and intensity causes your body to accumulate wear. Given proper time to recover from the damage, you can continue to improve. However, if your body can't keep up with the stress, greater damage or injury can occur (Exhaustion).
Imagine that you wake up in the morning with an empty bucket. Throughout the day, every instance of stress is stored in this bucket. Although everyone is unique in their capacity to handle stress, we all have a finite amount that we can deal with and still function.
This, then, is the big question for athletes, coaches and trainers: What can you do to prevent exhaustion?
In his book, High-Intensity Training The Mike Mentzer Way, bodybuilding legend Mike Mentzer acknowledged that training too soon after an intense exercise session depletes the body's resources which are necessary to rebuild itself; and that progress can actually be stalled or reversed without sufficient recovery between sessions.
Although Mentzer’s methods were geared towards bodybuilding , the principle behind rest applies to any form of resistance exercise: you need rest in order to adapt.
How To Tell When You’re Working Too Hard
It’s tough to figure out how much rest and recovery you need without knowing the signs of overtraining. For someone who is new to a program, it’s hard to “listen to your body” so here are some checkpoints to get you started:
Are there nagging injuries that don’t seem to go away?
Is your progress stalled?
Do you still feel tired when you wake up in the morning?
Is your resting heart rate elevated above average?
Do you find it hard to fall asleep soon after laying down for bed?
If you said yes to one or more of these questions, you might be overtraining! Read on to learn what you can do to get back on track.
1. Incorporate Recovery Sessions
Have you ever been too sore to go to the gym? Believe it or not, it happens to everyone no matter how in shape you are! Your body will naturally mitigate damage from training, but you can speed up the process by scheduling in 10-15 minute recovery sessions.
Recovery sessions can:
Help restore natural mobility and flexibility,
Alleviate pain which can cause muscle imbalances,
Circulate metabolic waste that accumulates during exercise, and
Help you heal faster between sessions.
Foam rolling, massage or other types of myofascial release can speed up recovery of a muscle by circulating metabolic waste, increasing blood flow and working out adhesions (i.e. knots, tightness) within the muscle tissue.
Stretching can inhibit (or relax) a fatigued muscle to restore natural mobility in the joint affected by that muscle.
Mobility work can improve a muscle’s range of motion, especially if it is tight due to the previous day’s training session.
2. Relax
Here’s what all those workouts and diets that promise to help you burn fat in your sleep are hoping you don’t know:
EVERYONE burns more calories in their sleep!
Your resting metabolic rate, which is the highest contributor to your daily Calorie expenditure, consists of the processes that occur when in total relaxation. All the benefits of exercise solidify when you are at rest, particularly during sleep.
The hours (or even days) between exercise sessions, all of these things happen:
Your muscles, bones and connective tissues grow bigger and stronger,
Your metabolism reprograms itself to cope with the stress,
Your nervous system forms neural pathways become better at the exercise
Your training actually continues even when you are not actively exercising.
While you sleep, your endocrine system releases human growth hormone (HGH). This is a powerful hormone that promotes muscle growth, fat burning and tissue reproduction. It is so powerful that athletes like bodybuilders take exogenous (i.e. not produced by their own body) doses of it in order to build unnatural amounts of lean muscle tissue. Here’s the catch: in order for your body to release it naturally, you have to SLEEP!
3. Take A Day or Two Off
If you’ve just started a training program, whether it be a new sport, a new group program, a new workout video or even a new martial art, you will likely “feel soreness in muscles you didn’t even know existed.” If soreness has ever made you skip that next exercise class or training session, you would not necessarily be wrong in doing so. Off days aren’t just for beginners.
So where is the sweet spot between struggling through the beginner phase and avoiding overtraining?
How many rest days is enough?
There’s no quick universal formula for calculating the number of rest days, but there are ways to check your body’s preparedness for returning to training.
Assuming you don’t have any injuries:
Resting Heart Rate - If your resting heart rate (taken immediately after you wake up in the morning) is significantly higher than your average (taken over the course of a few days), then it’s probably not a good idea to train that day. A high resting heart rate results from the elevated blood flow required to move nutrients to and from tissues that are being rebuilt.
Breath holds - If, 1 or 2 days after an intense training session, you are unable to hold your breath for more than 15-20 seconds after a complete exhalation, then your body is still trying to recover. The increased demand for oxygen that prevents you from holding your breath is an indication that your body is still in a rebuilding state.
How You Feel - At higher intensities of training, your nervous, endocrine and immune systems work extra hard to accommodate the force production and energy expenditure. High intensity exercise is a type of stress that doesn’t dissipate quickly without time to recover. If you just don’t feel like doing what’s on the schedule that day, change it up, take it easy, or take a day off altogether.
4. Take A Mental Break from Training
Sometimes you just need to take your mind completely off training. This is true especially if your training intensities demand a great deal of motivation, planning and mental effort for execution. Realize that, as your body gets stronger, faster, bigger, more reactive, etc., your brain works even harder to manage the demands.
If you find yourself stressed out about training, then take a mental break.
What To Do On Off Days
Off-days are a great opportunity to document and evaluate your success parameters. Without measurement and analysis, progress toward your goals can be sporadic.
Spend some time updating your logs, analyzing your workouts, meals, etc. Take the time to review training metrics like sleep, hydration, stress triggers, etc. Find patterns that either need to be reinforced, refined or removed from your program.
Remember that the body needs time to adapt to training, and that real, long-term progress cannot be rushed. In the quiet intervals away from the training floor, our minds and bodies are always reprogramming themselves to get faster, stronger, and leaner.
Remember that training is a way to enhance the life that you have, not add to the stress you are already suffering. Sometimes the stress of training just doesn't fit in with work, bills, lack of sleep, emergencies, illness, relationships, etc.
I always tell my clients," The iron waits patiently."
If your stress bucket is full, then come back another day so that you can go at 100% effort and focus. However, if all you have to give is 30%, then, by all means give all of it
To learn more, contact Coach Rupert Alfiler at coach_rup@roninmonsterfactory.com.
Comments