Are You Ready To Train?

How are you doing today?

Everyday when members walk in the gym I ask them “How are you doing today?” Sometimes I get the response “I didn’t get any sleep last night”, “My kid was sick”, “I have a cold”, “I was out partying” or a number of other responses. Sometimes I hear “great”, “awesome”, or my personal favourite from Craig “I’m going to Fuc* up your gym”.

Anytime I get this feedback I have an idea of how much I can push someone during the workout or if maybe today is a day that they should warm up with the group, work on some mobility, roll out and go home.

If recovery is the second part of training then why don’t people exercise recovery? This goes for any type of training. When you do your workouts and stress the body’s cardiovascular system, central nervous system, & energy systems you need time to recover and repair and recharge those systems. If you keep beating those systems down you may be forced to take more recovery than you think.

If you had a great weekend and got some great sleep (8-9hrs a night) ate well got in a workout or hit your mobility work and feel like taking on the world Monday morning when you hit the gym they you are ready to bring the heat. Lets say after that workout you didn’t bring any nutrition to recover with and went 4hrs without eating, had some fast food, coffee, very little water, and went another 5hrs without eating then only got 5hrs of sleep that night how do you think Tuesday is going to go? So you show up for your workout on Tuesday morning and its not so stellar. Lets say it’s about a 6/10 on the awesomeness scale. Lets say that the rest of Tuesday goes the same way Monday went. How do you think Wednesday is going to go?

Each day if we miss the chance to recover properly we are just beating down our bodies and doing more harm than good. Make sure you have a recovery plan along with your training plan to help you to succeed with your goals otherwise it might feel like you are running on a never ending wheel and you might just be digging yourself into a hole.

Other measures of readiness include a normal resting heart rate, grip strength, central nervous system and cardiac readiness. 

So next time I ask you “how are you feeling?” It lets me know if I can yell at you if your slacking off or I might suggest that you go a little lighter and easier that day because there’s nothing wrong with that.     

Paul