A few years ago, I was working out with a friend named Jack who was a former elite soldier. At 62 years old, Jack was grizzled but still incredibly fit. You could see the outline of his back muscles through his shirt, and it wasn’t like it was a tight shirt either. This wasn’t a man to mess with. He designed killer workouts for us, at times smirking as I read the day’s plan on his signature 4x5 notecards, daring me to complain. I said okay to all of them. I figured, if he could be that fit at his age, he was doing something right.
After I did a particularly difficult workout with Jack, I thought it’d still be a good day to go out and climb a (small) mountain. Twice. Then, the next day, it was box jumps. No matter that my legs were already screaming with soreness and exhaustion. I thought Jack would be disappointed if I gave up now. Being sore was part of the game, wasn’t it? If you didn’t push hard, you were letting weakness take control.
That wasn’t me. I wasn’t weak. I was going to push through, and maybe do an upper body workout the next day, you know…to give my legs a rest.
I didn’t make it to the next workout. I did an awkward jump up on the box, stepped off equally as awkwardly, and BOOM – an alarming jolt of pain shot up and down my leg like lightning. I thought this must be what it felt like to get stabbed.
There was no pushing through this pain. I was done.
The diagnosis: a torn quad muscle. A minimum eight weeks of recovery time, and no way around it. Jack felt terrible, but it was hardly his fault. He didn’t drag me up that mountain, he didn’t force me to do those box jumps. My pride said I could take it, but my body rebelled.
If you work out with any regularity, you may have fallen victim to this mentality too. I get it. For me, my workout is vitally important to my mental health. It’s my meditation. All can go wrong in a day, but at least I got a good workout in.
Ah, but then there’s that son of a b called overtraining, which can then lead to the real b, injury. Which is what happened to me.
Naturally, this sucked. I spent weeks staring longingly and creepily at other people in the gym doing squats and deadlifts while I sat on a bench with dumbbells. I tried to do sit-ups once, only to realize that not only could I NOT do them, I couldn’t even get myself back off the floor without flopping like a fish.
Four weeks after my injury, I tested it. I started with light bodyweight squats, stopping at the mere hint of pain. Slowly, I moved to more volume, then added light weight. Within 3 months, I was back to normal and actually hitting PRs regularly on my deadlift. It felt wonderful.
Three months of injury, and I had learned my lesson well. There was pushing yourself, and then there was pushing yourself to injury. I’m a patient person, but not when it came to taking it easy in the gym. But working out is a discipline, and sometimes, it takes discipline to know when you need to take a step back.
How do we cultivate this discipline?
I have a few ideas.
REST DAY. This is probably a no-brainer, but then again, if I had taken this concept seriously I probably wouldn’t have ended up limping up and down stairs for a couple of weeks. Why do we need rest days? First of all, your muscles only grow at rest, not when you are in the gym. Gym time is for tearing them down, and then your body says hey, that sucked – let’s rebuild and make them stronger the next time. And so on and so forth. If you don’t take a break, you won’t get that growth.
Maybe you’re not looking for growth, though. Maybe you’re just looking to burn calories and stay lean. You still need a rest day. Exercise, despite its obvious and numerous benefits, is a stressor. You are placing stress on your body when you work out, and if you don’t give it a break, the body rebels. You run the risk of fatiguing your central nervous system and your endocrine system to the point of breakage, and that produces all kinds of issues: adrenal fatigue, illness, and wacky hormonal responses, just to name a few.
Sometimes, we just want to stay in bed a bit longer and be lazy instead of working out. And sometimes it’s actually our bodies telling us that we need to be “lazy” that day, because you have to have recovery time. Try and listen, okay?
6 Reasons Why Rest Days Are Important
CORRECTIVE EXERCISE. Folks who have been working out for a while probably understand that form is more important than speed or weight when it comes to lifting properly. If your form breaks down at a certain tempo or weight, it’s time to back off one of those things until you’re back in line.
Bad form is the best way to get injured, or at the very least a reinforcement of poor recruitment patterns (i.e., inefficiencies in how your muscles work together to produce force). I bring this up because it’s so easy for lifters to measure success by weight. I’m no different. If they were to do an MRI of my brain, the pleasure center probably lights up like a Christmas tree when I hit a new PR on a lift. But more weight does not always mean progression. You have to get away from your ego on that front.
For example, I backed off the weight on my squat because I realized my weak hamstrings were causing my quads to take over, thus reinforcing that poor recruitment pattern. I could ignore this and continue with higher and higher weights, but eventually, it won’t end well. Instead of pushing for more weight, I opted to work in more hamstring-isolating movement into my programming. When I did squat, I used lighter weights and watched my form first. If my form broke down, then I dropped the weight even further.
Everything You Know About Corrective Exercise is Wrong
MOBILITY WORK. I was reminded again recently how important mobility is, especially as we grow older. Personally, I used to hate the thought of working on mobility. It seemed like a waste of time – let’s get on with the fun stuff! I once read an article that essentially said weightlifting was just as effective at improving flexibility as traditional stretching, so that was more than enough excuse for me to opt out of doing much warm-up or mobility work.
Then I got injured, and I also got older. We start to lose so much as we grow older, our mobility being one of the first things to go. I say nuts to that. You CAN get better even as you age. One of the ways to do so is to make sure your body stays mobile.
Why is mobility important? Think of your ankles, for example. From your feet to your head, your ankles are the first checkpoint in your kinetic chain. If your ankles are one link in the chain, imagine how they might affect the way the rest of your body moves if they are stiff, weak, or injured. Bad ankles could mean unstable knee joints, followed by stiff hip joints, and so on and so forth. If you aren’t injured, you could be shortly just from poor mobility in one joint.
I’ve posted this before, but I can’t recommend MobilityWOD enough as a great resource for working on mobility for any body part. Try this article for a nicely organized list of MobilityWOD videos.
Check out my other post on foam rolling as well.