I have been thinking
about football players and gymnasts over the last while. The men and women who do these extreme sports
have a lot to teach us, but not, perhaps, what we might think at first.
I am a fitness
professional. I believe that exercise is
good for all of us, as essential to our well-being as food and sleep. But just as I would not recommend that any of
us eat four times the necessary calories in a day or sleep for days on end, I
do not recommend the kind of workouts these athletes do. Some of us may be gifted with football skills
or acrobatic grace; the rules become different when we want to be professional
or Olympic.
The rest of us need to
exercise enough but not too much.
Enough means, at the very
least, that we do about 30 minutes of cardio five or six days a week and do
some kind of weight training once or twice a week. We also need to take the time to work on
flexibility, whether we just incorporate stretching or catch a yoga or Pilates
session.
Too much is a little
trickier to define because it depends on a lot of things. The easiest way to tell if we are doing too
much is that we hurt all the time. Our
bodies need time to recover and rest just like we need to work. If our muscle soreness doesn’t go away, it
probably means we are overdoing it.
Other signs include extreme fatigue (after we’ve ruled out work
all-nighters or small children or other usual suspects), injury—particularly repetitive
stress injuries--, illness, and sometimes weight changes.
We only get one body. We have to use it carefully, enough to keep
it strong and supple and not so much that we break it down.
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