The Art of Resting

Resting. Taking it easy. How the hell do you do it? Those of you following along here or coming to the gym know how hard I push myself. It's an addiction, there's no question about it. Mentally, I have a very hard time letting up and giving myself a rest. Here's an example. In my workout log I haven't written the word "rest" for 9 days. The last 4 days' workouts consisted of:

Sun:25km of skate skiing. 2.5 hours non-stop.

Mon: Prison Workout:10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 

-pullups

-Power wheel rollouts

-25 yd of bear crawls (once per round)

-16kg double kettlebell thrusters

-jumprope x 20 (rounds of 200,180,160,140, etc...)

completed this workout in 23:28 working at about 85-90% max effort

Tue: bike- 60 minutes on trainer with 4x5min tempo intervals 

- 3x5 double getup situps with double 20kgs

-3x10 1 arm strict military press with 20kg

-3x2 kettlebell dragon flag

Wed: bike- 60 minutes on the rollers

50 box jumps on 36" box

100 hindu pushups

50 zercher lunges with a 61# sandbag

10 turkish getups with 24kg

By the time i was on the turkish getups i couldn't get 5 in a row on either arm. I can normally get between 8 and 10 with a 24kg. This tells me it's time to rest. So I rested today. I did nothing. I don't think I even demonstrated anything with heavier than an 8kg kettlebell during my training sessions. But is this enough? 

Overtraining is a real problem for a lot of people. There's plenty of really smart people out there who have done lots of research and written really smart sounding scientific papers to explain what it is and how it affects the body. I'll simplify it for you. When you work your body really hard it interprets this as an attempt to murder it. One of our really cool instincts is a mechanism called self-preservation which demands that we do whatever it takes to survive. Pain is a part of this mechanism. The purpose of pain is so that you are inclined to stop doing whatever it is you're doing to cause this pain. When you are driven and mentally tough you continually push through the pain and this really pisses your body off. In an act of self-preservation, the body reacts to this by adapting to the stress you're putting on it by building muscle mass in order to better defend itself from these crazy workouts you put yourself through. But every time you put yourself through a very difficult, intense workout a certain period of recovery is required. If you give your body enough recovery, then you get really positive adaptations to the stress you're putting on yourself. But if you don't give yourself enough recovery then the opposite happens. You stop making strength gains, you become lethargic, your sleep patterns get thrown off, you start getting nagging injuries, you get sick.

Seems like it would be easy to avoid overtraining, no? But it's not.. Mentally, it's very easy to think you always have to go really hard if you're going to continually make gains. Especially when you have people like me telling you it takes hard work to get strong and fit.. But it's equally as important to rest. I know what you're thinking "c'mon Kevin, who the hell are you to tell us about rest?".. Good point. And I'll be the first to admit that I train harder than I would put any of my clients through. But I'll also say that I'm at a different fitness level than most, and I've been training at a high intensity for years. I also take care to mix my workouts up enough so that I'm not overworking the same movements and muscle groups on consecutive days. Also, I'm usually good about resting completely at least once every 5 days and there'll always be some low intensity days thrown in. My energy level is through the roof most of the time and I don't get sick. When my energy level comes down I back off. 

I have people at the gym who still have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that working at a really high intensity for 20-30 minutes is all the body needs or, in some cases, can handle. But I watch them get stronger and in better shape than they've ever been in their lives. There's no way they can argue with the results.. But there's always the ones who think they need more. I tell them they don't but they'll show up every day at least once and sometimes twice a day, two or three times a week for several weeks in a row.. They start getting tired, they're always sore, their energy goes down, they get sick, they stop seeing gains. Guess what.. It's called overtraining and it sucks and it's time to back off when it happens. As hard as that may be mentally, it's what you have to do if you want to continue to make gains physically. Resting should be the enjoyable part, especially when you spend so much time busting your ass.. Trust me on this one.

Train hard, rest easy,

Kevin