Hi everybody, Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness Personal Training Studio. We are YOUR personal trainers in Amarillo. Today we’re talking about over training. If you have any questions about today’s blog then please give us a call at 806-322-3188
Does practice make perfect or does it lead to an injury? Well it could be either or, right? Since we were kids, we were taught to keep practicing and we’d get it right. And to a point that’s right.
But what it typically builds in grown-ups is this mentality of more is better. And again, practice is great, you do have to practice something if you do something once and expect it to be perfect, well you might be one of my children, but it’s probably not gonna happen for you.
Instead we have to understand that we do have to practice things, but we also have to understand that more is not always better. That comes into all walks of life. Anything can be detrimental if we do too much of it. But when it comes to exercise a lot of times, people tend to over do exercise thinking that they can outrun a bad diet. That if they eat poorly during the holidays if they can just workout extra hard and they’ll burn it all back off.
Well, the sad thing is that’s not quite how our bodies work. Yes calories in versus calories out, yada yada, but if you look at the fact that your nutrition is 80 part of the game plan and your exercise is 20%. That does not mean that exercise is not beneficial, it’s an absolute necessary for that 20%, but if 80% of it is nutrition and you’re trying to use that small 20% to work out against a bad diet, it’s just not gonna happen. However, lots of people do it.
When is it too much. How should we be gauging this? What are we looking at anyways? What is overtraining? Overtraining is where you have worked the muscles beyond a place where they are able to repair themselves. Now, overtraining can lead to injury because if you continue to work on these muscles that have not been able to repair themselves then you’re going to overdo those muscles, and they are going to end up with some injury there.
That could cause a problem. In over training some symptoms of that are that you are taking in extraordinary amount of time to recover from a workout. This typically happens whenever you’re working out multiple hours in a day, or doing exercises that really you know are not meant for your body. There are just some populations of people that cannot do, say powerlifting, or some populations of people that should not be doing Zumba. There’s a million different ways to exercise and each person is so unique that they have to find the right way for them. That there’s not just one blanket statement that we could say this is great for this age group and this person. Instead, we have to look at each individual and know that, that’s kind of what we’re gaging against, is their unique abilities.
If you are having workouts that are, you’re not recovering from very quickly, you feel sore for a long time, if you have workouts that are leaving you fatigued all day long, and possibly into the next day that are causing you to have less sleep at night, or you start noticing that your progress isn’t quite on track for what it should be or what it normally is and that’ll be physical progress. You may also notice some issues with your hormones. Hormones, your endocrine system is such a fragile system, that just the littlest thing can throw it off and over training is one of those things.
We want to make sure that we’re paying attention to our body, that we’re seeing these things. How do we make sure that we’re getting enough exercise, not too much. Well, first off we don’t try to work out against a bad diet. We eat well. We rest well. And then we work out. Right. We get all three of those places in there together so the body can do what it needs to do.
Well, we want to make sure that we’re exercising enough. The general population, people are looking to get fit, and toned, and lose some fat, and improve their health and wellness, you’re looking at anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour a day. And you’re looking at anywhere from three to six days a week. You always want to take at least one day off and be able to enjoy life and just kind of play.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you should be lazy if you’re not working out right. Be active. There’s great ways to be active. You could go walk some stairs, you could park out further from the store, you could get up to go to the printer, get up to talk on the phone, go for a walk at lunch. There’s about a million different ways that you can stay active. Being active’s crucial, but making sure that you’re exercising getting an actual exercise program in about anywhere from three to six days a week and from 30 minutes to an hour would be great.
Now, what’s that gonna leave you with is if you’re doing this the right way for your body, and you’re giving your body what it needs, then you’re gonna have more energy during the day. You’re gonna be able to sleep better at night. You’re gonna recovery anywhere from 24 to 36 hours afterwards, fully recovered. And that would be with a really hard workout, if you didn’t get a super hard workout, it might be even less time. And you’re gonna start meeting your goals, physically. You’re gonna start hitting those goals, because your body’s being given what it needs.
We have to remember that while we have this moment of desperation all too often, clients come in all the time, or people come in to my office to talk to me, they tell me that in the past they’ve become so desperate, they’ll do anything that comes in front of them, and sadly they will. And that’s where a lot of these myths and scary programs come from, that really are not safe for the body. And whenever you hit that point of desperation, more is better, always seems to come to mind, right. “If I go really heavy on this diet, more will be better. If I go heavy on exercise, more will be better. If I go and do this natural treatment, more will be better”.
We have to remember that our bodies are meant to work like clockwork. And our brains are trying to control the wrong functions. Our brains need to work on the consistency of eating healthily and living a healthy life, whether that is being active every day, or actively exercising, or eating your healthy eating plan, or drinking enough water, or all of the above combined. We want to make sure that we’re living healthily, and to do that we work on the consistency of our habits rather than on dieting and trying to run off a bad diet at the gym.
Trying to make sure that your workouts are appropriate for you, bring them down to the intensity that you need, or raise them up to the intensity that you need, that’s where more is better doesn’t always come in. Right? Whenever you’re doing your workouts at home, especially the cardio and you start to try to put that cardio in, you think, and I’m done. We want to be sure and get enough, but not too much. And if you reach for those limits, if you pay attention to your body, your recovery cycles, your energy, your sleep, your progress being made, if you pay attention to those things and you start to see them maintaining or increasing, that’s great. If you start to see them decreasing going in a negative direction, that’s probably when we’re having some problems.
If you would like some help setting up a program that is unique and customized to your body to help you be able to get just the right amount without over training, feel free to give us a call. 806-322-3188.