Make Haste Slowly
June 26th 2007 17:05
As I have said in the past, it is my opinion that fitness training commonly begins with a crisis,lasts a few weeks or months and ends in illness, injury, overpowering fatigue,boredom,and failure. This unwanted result is,I think, largely a product of allowing one's emotions to dictate a training approach that is too severe for the body.
It is one of the themes of this site that your body does not have a brain. It cannot receive text messages from your mind which tell it that it needs to do exactly what you want it to do and the sooner the better. Without being overly philosophical the chasm between your mind and body is real and it is never more obvious than when you wish your body to do something and you use your mind to try to elicit your purpose with a pattern of action. Your body will follow along with the actions you will it to perform, but the state that results from these actions is more a matter of the preprogrammed responses to stimulus than to the power of mind over matter.
What does all this mean? It means that the body will do what it does and you will make progress in fitness if, and only if, you learn about its patterns. For anyone who begins a new physical regimen the most important feature of the body's adaptation patterns is that it is very difficult to over work the body if the amount and quality of rest is calibrated to the workload and factored into the regimen. Simply put, rest is as vital as work to the success of a fitness program.
The fact is that when you train your body you are balancing work and rest at all times. When you allow yourself to rest properly, you will soon perceive that your body is not only building strength and endurance for your activity itself, but it is also steadily improving your ability to recover from workouts. If you let your enthusiasm or despair drive you to try to hurry by working too much too fast, your recovery adaptations are slowed and your system is thence pushed into a state where it cannot adapt and can even deteriorate. This means that you will begin to feel inordinately tired, unenthused, or even ill. We all know that those conditions will mean that you will not continue your program.
How to proceed? You must use your mind to limit your emotional response to your realization that you need to be fit and make your haste slowly. You must begin to exercise with rest and recovery foremost in your mind. Yes, you can force body to work out every day etc. You will regret trying it,though.If you are driving yourself, you have to decide whether the resistance to more that you are experiencing is strictly psychological or actually your body signaling that you are going too fast. If you are a complete rookie I would say 3 workouts of 15 minutes a week, done with vigor, may be about all you can really handle. Those workouts must be intense for you to get the results you want,but you cannot compensate for lazy workouts by adding more of them.
My opinion is that two types of people get results from fitness work. The fist are so gifted that their bodies are just going to adapt. The second are those that learn very early to connect with their bodies and comprehend what the true state of their condition is. Few are really in the first group,but anyone can be in the second.Your servant, as always.
It is one of the themes of this site that your body does not have a brain. It cannot receive text messages from your mind which tell it that it needs to do exactly what you want it to do and the sooner the better. Without being overly philosophical the chasm between your mind and body is real and it is never more obvious than when you wish your body to do something and you use your mind to try to elicit your purpose with a pattern of action. Your body will follow along with the actions you will it to perform, but the state that results from these actions is more a matter of the preprogrammed responses to stimulus than to the power of mind over matter.
What does all this mean? It means that the body will do what it does and you will make progress in fitness if, and only if, you learn about its patterns. For anyone who begins a new physical regimen the most important feature of the body's adaptation patterns is that it is very difficult to over work the body if the amount and quality of rest is calibrated to the workload and factored into the regimen. Simply put, rest is as vital as work to the success of a fitness program.
The fact is that when you train your body you are balancing work and rest at all times. When you allow yourself to rest properly, you will soon perceive that your body is not only building strength and endurance for your activity itself, but it is also steadily improving your ability to recover from workouts. If you let your enthusiasm or despair drive you to try to hurry by working too much too fast, your recovery adaptations are slowed and your system is thence pushed into a state where it cannot adapt and can even deteriorate. This means that you will begin to feel inordinately tired, unenthused, or even ill. We all know that those conditions will mean that you will not continue your program.
How to proceed? You must use your mind to limit your emotional response to your realization that you need to be fit and make your haste slowly. You must begin to exercise with rest and recovery foremost in your mind. Yes, you can force body to work out every day etc. You will regret trying it,though.If you are driving yourself, you have to decide whether the resistance to more that you are experiencing is strictly psychological or actually your body signaling that you are going too fast. If you are a complete rookie I would say 3 workouts of 15 minutes a week, done with vigor, may be about all you can really handle. Those workouts must be intense for you to get the results you want,but you cannot compensate for lazy workouts by adding more of them.
My opinion is that two types of people get results from fitness work. The fist are so gifted that their bodies are just going to adapt. The second are those that learn very early to connect with their bodies and comprehend what the true state of their condition is. Few are really in the first group,but anyone can be in the second.Your servant, as always.
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