Captain Obvious!

Time for another bulletin from Captain Obvious.  Today she would like to let us all know that overdoing our workouts is bad.  We work out because we want to feel better, after all.  When we are sore and crabby, that is not an improvement.  Injury is not a thing we want.

But our culture is always after us to do more and faster and harder.  I get it.  I live here, too.

 

So here’s the mind game to get past it:  Doing the right amount of work is actually the fastest way to our goals.

 

In the moment, here are a couple of techniques we can use to avoid the temptation to overdo.  One is to lean in to perfect form.  To keep the form ideal, we are going to have to slow down.  We may discover, when we do, that ten reps aren’t all that easy anymore and we really don’t want to do eleven, much less twenty.

 

In a similar vein, we can choose a different tempo.  Most of us default to an even balance between the lifting (“concentric,” for your fitness nerds) phase and the lowering (“eccentric”) phase.  Consciously slowing the lowering phase forces us to control what we often think of as the easy part.  It turns out that trying to control gravity is hard!  We get a lot of work in few reps, get plenty tired, and do not feel all that capable of doing more in the moment.

 

Finally, we are allowed to rest.  Our bosses, families, and friends may not give us this message, but it’s true.  We do better when we rest.  I hesitate to say this because it’s pandering to our culture, but we will actually accomplish more if we rest when we need to.  (This is the part where I remind everyone that we are valuable no matter how much or how little we “accomplish” in our lives.  Our value is intrinsic and has no relation to how much we can bench press.)

 

Do enough.  Be happy!