Recovery: Looking Beyond Physical Rest
People often seek help from a coach, physical therapist, or physician for a seemingly magical intervention, exercise, or training plan that will help them get through their current situation and to the next level. As with most coaches and healthcare practitioners, I love helping those that reach out to break through to new milestones of performance, return to training, or figure out a path to consistency for their overall well-being. There is nothing like someone hitting a PR they have been chasing for years or getting back to running after “failing” PT before.
While most of the time a better or more intensive approach is needed, sometimes we go the other direction completely. Our ability to respond to training stress or an injury is not just about the X’s and O’s of your training and exercise dosage. It’s about how you are setting yourself up to handle those physical stressors. More specifically, how well do they balance with all the other stressors of your life?
When there is a lot to balance outside of training and rehab, it can be tough to make headway. In these seasons of life, the best move is often addition by subtraction. Think about it this way...imagine a freshly stacked Jenga tower. It’s a pretty solid structure! You can continue to stack seemingly as much on top as you’d like. However, what happens when you have to pull one out from the bottom, let’s call it a poor night’s sleep, and stack it on top. It’ll still be rather stable, but less so than before. Take out another for a stressful day at work. Another for your kid or significant other who is sick, requiring your help. And let’s do one more for fun representing a day you didn’t get to eat very well in quantity or nutrient density. All the sudden, you’re riding a thin line. Trying to push any additional physical stressors will push you over the edge and have your metaphorical Jenga tower tumbling.
To your body, stress equals stress. It doesn’t matter where it comes from within your ecosystem. Piling on too much can result in a mental break down, emotional out lash, or even physical pain or flare ups regardless of how perfect your training and exercise plan looks on paper. Sometimes people are good at recognizing this or just don’t have the bandwidth, naturally causing them to pull back on something. Other times people are not so in tune. At any given time, I am usually working with at least one person where this is the case and bringing awareness to this is a huge game changer.
Next time you are feeling really stressed, fatigued, or having some pain, consider all that has been going on in your life within the last month.
How has your sleep been?
How well have you been fueling day to day and within training sessions?
Have you been ill or around someone who was?
Have you had more obligations or responsibilities lately?
What have your stress levels been like?
Maybe you’ve just been full gas bouncing from one thing to the next with little to no break without realizing it. Tuning into that and adjusting appropriately, may just be the thing to help keep you moving forward. As Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Remember to take a breath occasionally and until next time...Happy running,
Adam Schwerdt, DPT, USATF Lv-1