Work in Progress

            Your physical body and your self are always going to be a work in progress.  As someone who is not exactly thrilled by uncertainty, this is not an easy fact to accept.  Building muscle definition takes a lot of dedication and hard work and it is not something that will show up overnight.  But, if you actively work at it over an extended period of time you will be wonderfully rewarded with results.  Each goal, however, has to be another step on your fitness journey, and you can’t head down this path with any sort of end goal or picture in your mind.  I kept thinking there would be a point at which I would say, “Yes.  This is good.  I just want to stay exactly like this for the rest of my life and all I have to do now is maintain it.”  That point is never going to come, and I don’t think I want it to.  It’s not that I’m hypercritical of my body or that I am always looking for flaws and nitpicking at things I want to “fix”.  It’s not that at all. 

It’s that life is a work in progress and you have to keep moving.  I will set strength goals or target certain groups of muscles that I want to tone, or gradually work on a specific yoga pose.  All of these are gradual goals that I will have to build up to over time, and once I reach them I will find new goals.  I saw a great quote today that said, “It’s your life, your big yoga class.”  I started thinking about how I could apply that to my entire life.  How can I scale today’s vinyasa flow class, for example, to the timeline of my life?  Today’s class was full of layered poses, meaning that each step in the pose was a pose in itself and you could stop at any layer along the way.  The last layer was extremely difficult and everyone was encouraged to move as deep into the layers as possible, but you could stop wherever you needed to along the way.  I went as far as I could; I pushed myself, but it came from within and not from comparing myself to the person on the mat next to me.  I moved at my own pace and took pride in my own small victories.  I also surprised myself, going deeper than I thought I could in many of the poses.  The moment was right, the environment was right, and the teacher guided me further than I would have gotten on my own.

Many of the poses looked absolutely impossible when she demonstrated them, but there was no judgment and I just went for it, just to see how far I could go.  Most of the poses looked like I wouldn’t make it past the first or second layer, but I was able to go pretty far on all of them except the last one.  The last pose, I did indeed only get to the second layer, and I didn’t beat myself up over it.  I pushed as far as I could go without pushing myself over the edge into an injury or snapping something out of a socket.  I acknowledged my own personal boundary and respected that line and my own body.

Life can, indeed, be like one giant yoga class.  You can start your days with an intention just like a yoga class.  You can learn to compete only with yourself and to respect your limits, while challenging them at the same time.  You can surprise yourself.  You can always take life’s equivalent of savasana if you need it, be it a half hour break to watch a television show, having a scoop of ice cream for dessert, or just going to bed early one night because you need it.  And finally, if you dedicate yourself to working on something you really want, eventually you will be able to contort yourself into that final, impossible-looking layer of that pose.

It Was Bound to Happen

            My body finally got mad at me for the crazy workouts.  It was bound to happen eventually.  A little less than a month ago I felt like I was hitting a plateau and decided that the solution was to increase the length and intensity of my workouts.  I started doing an hour and a half a day at the gym instead of an hour.  This put my cardio workouts at close to 1,000 calories and I added in extra circuits to bring my strength training days to at least an hour and a half, sometimes longer.  I had been going to yoga once a week but insisted on also doing an hour and a half at the gym on those days.  Rest days were absolutely not a part of my vocabulary.  I started out without any real exit strategy, no plan for when to come back down. 

It certainly brought me out of my plateau; my weight stabilized and my muscles tightened and it did great things for a couple weeks.  I also didn't have to worry about self control in the kitchen quite as much because when you're burning close to a thousand calories doing cardio, a big bowl of pasta is necessary fuel rather than a special treat.  But then I started to wonder if this wasn’t a little overkill.  If this level of working out was what I had to do just to maintain my body, not even lose weight but maintain things the way they are, then perhaps I was doing something wrong.  This thought popped up a couple times but I continued anyway.  I’m not so good with moderation sometimes.  I was going hard and I loved it. 

Fortunately, my body knew best and my body did not love it so much after a month.  I started taking one rest day a week just because I was mentally and physically exhausted by the end of the week.  This went well and I could feel how much stronger and healthier my muscles were when I returned to the gym.  However, I still did not come down from the super-intense, hour and a half workouts.  Finally, my body snapped.  You name it, it was bothering me or not working right.  Everything from my wrist to various organ systems were causing me trouble.  It was nothing serious or life threatening by any means, but everything was just a little off.  My body was mad at me and was expressing it by refusing to run smoothly.

Yesterday was Wednesday, and I had just taken a rest day on Friday but my body was absolutely not having anything to do with working out yesterday and I stayed home from the gym.  Today was yoga day, and I decided that perhaps the 90 minute vinyasa flow class would be enough of a workout on its own without also going to the gym.  Tomorrow will be a cardio day, but I’ll only be doing an hour.  It’s time to come back to reality and to an actually sustainable exercise plan.  Yoga was amazing.  It cleansed my body and cleared my head and re-grounded me.  It was exactly what I needed. 

Moral of the story: in working out and in life, you can go really hard for a short period of time if you need to, but it’s called going hard for a reason.  It’s not sustainable in the long term.  When something is too intense, it is not sustainable in the long term.  Work, relationships, your own body and mind, all of these things can only sustain so much.  When they start to break down, you’ve gone too far.  The goal is to avoid reaching that point in the first place, but if things are already breaking down then it’s time to make a change.  I let myself wallow in the lack of functioning for a couple days and now I’m ready to pick myself back up and keep moving forward.