Reach Your TRUE POTENTIAL While Avoiding Overtraining!
Don't Let Working
Fitness can be a fickle friend. For weeks you may be a fitness fanatic exercising hard every day and then all of a sudden you don’t want to be anywhere near it. Why does this happen? How do you overcome it? What can you do to be sure this never happens to you?
The ultimate goal when exercising is to always be improving. Whether trying to lose weight, gain muscle or increase your strength everyone wants results. However, the key to staying focused and not losing your drive is to understand that rest is just as important as the time put in the gym. Without adequate rest your body will not only lose the time it needs to recover properly, but you also will run the risk of overtraining.
Overtraining is the wall most people hit that stops them dead in their tracks. It can lead to a wide variety of symptoms including a high rate of fatigue and depression. If you start to notice these symptoms then it is time to take a break, reassess your meal plan and take a close look at your sleeping habits to ensure you are getting 8 hours a night. If overtraining happens to you, it would be best to take a full week off from exercising and turn your focus to eating healthy and getting enough rest.
So how do you continuously push yourself to new limits while avoiding overtraining? The secret lies within “deload weeks”. A deload week is a week of training, usually after 4 - 6 weeks straight of intense training, where you train with 50 - 60% of your normal intensity. The goal here is to stay active, but mainly just go through the motions. What this does is provide your muscles and CNS (Central Nervous System) the time they need to properly recover. When training in a deload week you still want to make sure you are hydrating and eating just as you would during your normal training. If you do a lot of intense running, it may be a good idea to do low impact cardio to the point of a slow jog.
Everyone has goals they want to reach and if you put the time into your training, you will definitely reach yours. Just make sure the journey you take to get there is a safe one with no pit stops in Overtraining city! Eat healthy, drink lots of water, sleep well, and remember that Hermanites Train Harder! #HTH
