Many fitness training facilities push recovery to the side and train their athletes to work at a max effort every session regardless of other aspects occurring in their life.
Crushing it in the gym is a great thing. Crushing it every single day? Maybe not.
Here’s why:
Our bodies NEED time to adapt and recover from workouts. We shouldn’t go into the gym every day and max out or do every thing as quickly as we possibly can. We should absolutely train heavy multiple times a week, however we have to make sure we’re recovering from that. But the truth is, most people are not.
If our bodies don’t have time to chill out every once in a while, it’s going to come back and bite us in the butt. We’re going to be exhausted and not have achieved the adaptations we were training to achieve in the first place.
Exercise is stress and our body reads it as that. This is in addition to all our other stressors we have going on. As parents, husbands, wives, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, bosses, business owners, etc. we’re juggling about 1,000 things each day.
All this stress= poor recovery
For more information on how stress affects our body especially as it relates to obesity can be found in previous post by Dan. Stress: The Real Epidemic
When was the last time you took 5-10 minutes to yourself during the day without any distractions?
I don’t mean when was the last time you sat back and drank a cold one to relax or laid on the coach and watched a movie. Because, surprisingly, our bodies may actually still be in a stressed out state during these type of activities. I mean, when was the last time you laid completely still, thought about nothing, and took some good relaxing breaths.
For most of us, we can’t even remember this time. If this is true for you, your body might be stuck in a stressed out state and unable to escape it.
In our bodies, we have two systems that make up the central nervous system. The parasympathetic system is active when we’re relaxed and ultimately when we’re breathing efficiently. The sympathetic system otherwise referred to as our “fight or flight” system is active when we’re stressed and not breathing efficiently. The majority of people whom I have met are stuck in a sympathetic state. This causes them to have poor rib cage positioning. Because of this, their lungs are still inflated, ribs flared, and their resting heart rate is probably around 80 to 90 bpm. This isn’t optimal for recovery.
How do we fix that?
We can put our central nervous system back into a parasympathetic state just by breathing better. A chill pill with some awesome science behind it.
We may not be able to pay the bills for you or resolve the fight you might have had with your wife or husband, but we can certainly teach you methods that will help your body react better to those stressors.
What we have found is that if we can fix how someone breathes, we can influence their nervous system and signal it to relax. Relaxation= recovery= adaptations (max strength, cardiac output, fat loss). If we do this during the day and take 5-10 minutes to focus on breathing correctly we can do wonders for our recovery.
This diagram shows that through a complete exhale, we are able to relax the diaphragm and in turn get the abdominals to contract and the spinal extensors to relax. In addition to this, the resting heart rate will be lower.
Fix your breathing and you’ll recover better.
For more information on fix breathing patterns and why it’s important check out a full article on it here: The Value of Blowing Up a Balloon.
Thanks to the Postural Restoration Institute we have learned a repositioning exercise that we commonly use with our clients in order to get them breathing better. Check out the video below for more information from Dan German talking about this repositioning exercise that Scott is demonstrating.
If you’re stressed and it’s taking a toll on your recovery, contact Force Barbell to see how we can change your life.
Live Light, Lift Heavy
Melissa G