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.