Listen to your body
Don't over train
Sessions should be short and sweet: the standard guideline for maximum strength training is two hours or less. Any longer is ineffective. However, if you are training endurance, you can go longer. If you can’t stop and want more, try double sessions. One in the am, one in the pm, leaving at least two hours in between to rest and recover. Doing one more set when you’re tired is only putting yourself in a hole that gets deeper with each try, making recovery even harder. Be patient; stop when you feel strong, and don’t go to failure.
- lack of snap and dynamic power
- over all feeling of malaise or being run down; getting sick more often than usual
- lack of psych and motivation to train. (Different then plain laziness!)
- getting the yawns part way through your session
- general heaviness, especially in the legs
- mentally tired, foggy in the mind
- central nervous system fatigue. This can occur after too many hard sessions in a row and can be really harder to recover from. Use periodization training to prevent this and keep a training log.
Don’t repeat things over and over
Don’t expect immediate results

Focus on movement over strength
Stop if it hurts

For example, one day while doing physio I was listening to a podcast about training and injury prevention. The guy was talking about the subtle messages we receive from our bodies that warn us of its limit. As I was doing my I, Y, T’s with small weights, a very little pain rushed through my shoulder that normally I’d ignore as it was just so freaking small but as he continued speaking, something clicked… I immediately dropped the weight and did the exercise with bodyweight alone. The pain stopped. My body wasn’t ready for that increase and was being kind enough to tell me. From that day on, my focus has been on listening to those little messages and my recovery has only been going uphill.
Take care of you:
Training is stress on the body. Combined with the general stresses of life, that is a lot of wear and tear. Don’t overdo it, be patient and take care of yourself. Get plenty of sleep, eat a balanced healthy diet with wholesome, nutrient dense unprocessed foods that will meet the demands of a recovering body and last but not least, know your body well enough and listen to it! If you are doing physio, focusing on doing the moves well to speed recovery.
Good Luck!!
[…] Here is a link to a previous post on injury prevention. […]