Recovery is the key to finding your training-life balance. We live surrounded by stress that negatively affects recovery and, although exercise is beneficial for health, abusing it can be counterproductive. When we have a training plan integrated with a rest plan, a balance begins to exist in your life.
There is research that has shown that stress can accumulate, including that caused by physical exercise. Obviously, this is not to say that you shouldn't train, but taking it to the extreme can make you a complete jerk. Do you like to train hard? Well, dedicate time to recovery, with the same seriousness that you dedicate to eating and training.
Get out of your comfort zone
The training is based on creating a stimulus that forces the body to leave its comfort zone. And this occurs through a process we call adaptation. As the body adapts to the stimulus, the athlete must continue to push the body to progress further.
Many fitness lovers understand this theory, but they forget that to create this adaptation to the stress of training, a rest with adequate recovery is necessary.
There are those who take everything to the extreme and constantly strive to increase their goal by adding more stimuli. As a result we can obtain the opposite of what we are looking for. The more stimulus, the greater the release of stress hormone, so an excess could be catabolic and destructive for any adaptation.
This is not to say that you should not do one. progressive overload while adding more intensity and volume in the long run. Of course it is necessary to progress, but keep in mind that the harder you train, the more rest you will need to keep growing.
Although there are also those at the other extreme and they don't even deign to train. Undertraining will not allow enough stimulation and will take you much longer to achieve your goal and progress.
How to do a progressive overload?
When we train excessively, a physiological response known as overtraining occurs. Eye! We must be clear that the amount depends on each person; for what one may be excessive, for another it may be moderate. Using this term lightly can lead to misunderstandings, and there are people who call it “overtraining” to something that is really within your reach. The worrying thing about reaching that scope excessively.
Of course, that scope is necessary from time to time to continue creating stimuli and improve adaptation. And that's just the progressive overload: the training in which we conscientiously push ourselves to force.
This effort, very surely, causes fatigue if it is done very often, for too long or with great intensity. That's why many talk about over training.
Of course, there are many ways to achieve progressive overloads, but very few people have been interested in recovery techniques. Normally, we think about eating, sleeping or reducing the training load.
You must find the balance
The really important thing about this article is that recovery is essential to achieving balance. Without balance, we become one-sided in training and in life. You know: the ying and the yang, the dark and the light, the anabolic and the catabolic.
It would be interesting for you to understand how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work. For an athlete it is essential to understand what our body is like.
El parasympathetic nervous system It is in charge of regulating anabolic hormones (those that build), which is a function that occurs during rest and recovery. Most believe that you increase muscle mass when you train, but actually exercise is a catalyst.
Moreover, the sympathetic nervous system It has a catabolic nature and is responsible for all the physical processes that allow you to overcome training (adrenaline and norepinephrine). Both hormones are also catabolic in nature.
When we put ourselves in a sympathetic state for short, controlled periods, we will perform well and achieve the physical conditioning we desire. It is precisely in this state that a person has the feeling of having trained correctly and feels euphoric.
And we really would love to feel like that all the time, but the body works differently. Your body constantly tries to be in balance.
If we subject the organism to a catabolic state for a long time, it will begin to destroy everything it catches (the muscles among it). Learn how to bring your body into a parasympathetic (or anabolic) state.
The balance between training and recovery
I am not going to deny that doing physical exercise becomes addictive, and can be the cause of some problems if it is abused. That feeling of euphoria can make many people constantly want to achieve it, but they do not realize how it affects in the long term. Both intensity and volume of exercise should be added gradually in a long-term program.
A good training plan prevents burnout and allows you to know your body well enough to understand the signals it is sending you.