I know several fitness people who are frequently sick or run down because they exercise too much (i.e. they overtrain). These are people who want to be fit, yet the activity they’ve chosen to make them fit, exercise, is actually making them sick.
There are limits to what your body can recover from. If you exceed those limits you will experience ill health in one form or another. Different people have different recovery abilities. It depends on your diet, your digestive system, how much rest you get, your body’s constitution, etc.
The problem occurs when people confuse motion for progress and exercise for exercise’s sake. Exercise is a stimulus that tears down the body. It is only while we rest that we give our body time to recover from exercise. If we shortchange our body on this needed time, our recovery is compromised and ill health is the result.
Most people can only handle 2-3 hard resistance training sessions per week. I train hard three times every 8-9 days. The other days I take it easy and do joint mobility, stretching, and walking.
One quick way to determine whether you should push it is by listening to your morning pulse. Take your pulse everyday and average it out for a week. If your pulse is higher by 3 beats, you should take it easy that day and skip the hard training.
Aside from taking your pulse, you can take a health inventory. How do you feel? Do you get sick frequently? If you do, then you have some work to do to figure out why.
Finally, the next time you feel a compulsion to exercise, remember this Dan Kennedy cartoon:
Start making plans for all your extra time that you’re not spending exercising.
Related posts:
- How to avoid overdoing it at the first sign of progress
- If You Desire Success, Avoid Quick Fix Solutions
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