Rest? Who needs rest?

Actually, we ALL do. That whole “rest is for the weak” thing is actually the complete opposite. Rest is for the strong, and those who want to be stronger. Here’s a link to an interesting article I found today about the importance of rest and recovery as part of your workout regime – check it out.   (while I’ve been “power-resting” the past few weeks for all my various injuries… LOL)

http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/sampleworkouts/a/RestandRecovery.htm

One step backwards?

I’m a pretty busy person. As an EMT, I work long days and can work anywhere from 36 to 60 hours in a given week. On top of that I play rugby every spring and fall, and being a competitive person, missing practice is out of the question, unless of course I’m stuck working a long shift. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard for me to find time to get my butt to Crossfit, even though the training I do at ACF is extremely beneficial to my rugby performance. So recently I’ve only been able to go once or twice a week, not nearly as much as I used to go, but better than never right? The other day I went to Crossfit and decided to do some heavy lifting, I figured I’d shoot for my previous backsquat one rep max, and since I was feeling confident, maybe I’d hit a new PR. Yeah…. I was 25lbs short of my one-rep max and I could barely lift the bar, 5 more lbs and I probably would have had to bail. Needless to say, I left the gym extremely frustrated with what I considered a complete failure.

So what’s my point? For one, you can only expect to gain as much as you give. How can I expect certain muscles to get stronger if I never work them? It’s not even that I can’t go to Crossfit as much, it’s that if I want to see results I need to make them happen on my own, whether it’s at the gym or at home. Crossfit is not just a place where you go to workout, it’s a way of working out that you can take anywhere – it’s designed so that once you know the movements, you can create your own programming based on your goals. So why haven’t I been doing my own programming? I obviously haven’t been approaching my fitness in the right way. And that’s the other thing I took from this “failure” – you have to use your setbacks as stepping stones. I’m not getting the results I want because I’m not putting the right amount of energy and effort into it, so I need to change my approach. I could sit around and let myself be frustrated by my loss of strength and keep trying to get by with one or two workouts a week because “I have no choice”, but honestly, what good is that gonna do? So what I need to do is realize that I DO have a choice, that just because I don’t have a trainer to tell me what to do doesn’t mean I can’t make my own workouts to do at home or work when I can’t get to the gym. You can’t let your setbacks slow you down, you have to let them motivate you to push yourself that much harder.

So sure, I may have gone one step backwards, but now I have a firm goal in mind – not only will I make up the lost distance, but I will go one step farther, and continue to move forward. The next time I hit the bar for some heavy squats, I will be hitting a PR.