Overdo your Routine?

You have your routine. You do it on a regular schedule. What happens when you overdo it?

This can be answered in a few ways.

The physical: You hurt, you pulled something, you over stretched your bounds. The is pain. There is hurt. There is learning. I'll come back to why this can be a good thing. Every cloud, silver lining kind of thing.

The mental: You question why this one workout takes its toll on you like none before. You think you're weak. You start trying to compare yourself to others around you. We'll talk soon as to why this is good and bad.

Let's start with why we feel pain. It's simple, everything I have ever read tells us we feel pain, so we can tell if we are doing something wrong. It shows us our physical limitations and keeps us from doing things that can seriously injure us. However, minor pain is a good thing, especially if your trying to increase your muscles. In order to increase muscle size and ability you literally have to tear your muscles. That's right, you have to create small tears in the muscle and when they heal your muscles get bigger. Weird, huh? In this case pain is a good thing. Minor physical pain (only you can decide what you consider minor) can be a good thing.

That said I am going to give you this small piece of advice...Do not go out and injure yourself trying to bulk up. It still takes time and over doing it on a regular basis is what causes long term injury. Yes, working out and trying to build muscle can hurt you, but, doing it correctly and learning how to do it and not just go off half-cocked is important too.

So the silver lining is that if you learn to do things right, listen to your body and give it time, you can do this and make yourself a better you. All things that we all want right? That's why your reading these.

On to what your thinking. In a lot of ways what you think is so much more important than what you do. What do I mean by that? Simply this...believe in yourself and good things will happen. alright, you got me, I'll step back and try to explain myself.

This past Saturday I did a workout that that killed me. I was working out with another guy and I wanted to keep up (and honestly, wanted to do more than what he could). The problem in my mind is that I started an hour before he got there and I did my cardio in the process of getting ready to do the lifting. Our focus on this particular day was legs. I ran a mile, in the fastest time I ever have, and then I did my time on the stepper and worked on my lower back (the weakest point of my body). Then he showed up and we got started on the legs (Cause running and doing the stepper really don't count for legs, right?). I put up the most amount of weight on the leg press that I have done in years. We did leg curls, leg press and calf extensions. All this focusing on my legs. I woke up on Sunday and my legs felt lie someone took a dagger and plunged it into my thighs every time I would sit down or stand up. What was my decision to fight this pain? That's right I suited up and went for an almost 2 mile run...bad idea. Why? Why did I do it?

I was mad at my body for being in such pain and I thought that if I was able to get moving it would help loosen up those muscles. I was mad that I hurt, I was disappointed that I was unable to workout and be fine the next day. I was sad that even after I figured out a way to "overcome" the pain, it didn't help.

Mentally, I couldn't accept what physically my body was telling me. Thankfully, for me I have a wonderful wife and she was able to get me to look at this in a different way. To skip a workout today simply so that I could heal a bit. I'll be back at tomorrow, but, today I am letting my body heal a bit. This will allow me to be both happier (mental state) and stronger (physical) in the long run, with no major or extended injury.

I hope when you're working through the two states of mental and physical fitness that you can take something from this that will help you get through that day or two after you overdo your workout and come out the other side both mentally and physically in better shape.

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Until next time Gentle Readers,

Jaxion Rebel