Have you ever hit the wall with your training and workouts? Your training readiness has zeroed out. You don’t want to exercise today, tomorrow, or this week. You need a break. But if you take a break, what happens to all the progress you have made the past several weeks and months? What should you do?
Forgive yourself. Allow yourself a break. You ran out of gas. You are going to be okay. Criticizing yourself for responding to a workload with appropriate fatigue is not going to help you recover.
Take a pause and examine why you are exhausted. Look over the past few weeks and your family stress, work stress, social stress, sleep, diet, caloric deficits, exercise workload, exercise variety, and exercise intensity.
With intense exercise we don’t just need cellular recovery, our endocrine and neurological systems need recovery also. Muscular fatigue and exhaustion can recover in 48 to 72 hours. Neural and endocrine systems can take up to two weeks or longer.
When you lack explosiveness or pop, that is a sign of neural fatigue.
Emotional changes and emotional lability can be symptoms of endocrine fatigue. Look for warning signs in your training log that can act as signs to program in more variety, restoration, and recovery in the future.
Take small bites. What can you get done in 30 or 45 minutes? What strength and skills are priorities to maintain if not sharpen? Work on your priorities in a 30 to 45 minute block and call it a day. Train again in two days. Or train again tomorrow if you have the desire. When your training readiness returns, add volume and frequency.
When you start to feel sharp, quick, solid, and strong, you are ready to dive back in.
Good luck with your training.
Tom