Training is not just working out, but working out PLUS rest. The harder you push your body, whether through distance training, intensity, or strength conditioning, the more you have to rest to recover. We all know about the benefits of quality recovery: sleep, active recovery, along with a healthy diet and what I like to call the aerobic lifestyle. Essentially, the less stress you’re under in other aspects of your daily life, the harder and longer you can train. If you’re parenting kids during the day, eating poorly, and not sleeping well, then you’re living a less aerobic or more anaerobic lifestyle, which means your training will be compromised. To account for this, I’ve changed the way I look at the training equation. Here’s the new Sock Doc formula:
Training = (Working Out + Daily Stress) / Rest & Recovery
You can see from this new formula that the more external daily stress (work, family obligations, and poor diet, for example) you have in your life, the more it will affect your training, and the more rest and recovery you will need. Many athletes do not take into account their external stresses, so they get injured, sick, or underperform. You can handle longer workouts, be it a long run or a long power session, more often if you’re under less stress. You can obviously handle those more if you have more time to rest and recover. The idea here is to reduce or eliminate external stress as much as possible while ensuring you recover and rest efficiently.
I like to tell patients to “fix what you can fix.” This means there are some things you can change in your life and some you cannot. For example, everybody can change their diet. You can reduce or eliminate refined carbs, unhealthy vegetable oils, caffeine, if you need to—things like that. Dietary changes have huge impacts on a person’s life—not just their daily activities but their workouts and sleep too. So it’s a great place to start. No need to go into that more here; there’s plenty of info on this site to help you address your diet. Just remember that diet is huge when it comes to training properly; it’s a significant factor in the recovery part of the equation. The healthier your diet, the faster you’ll recover and the more your body can handle working out and daily stressors. If you need to know where to start, check out the Sock Doc view of the paleo diet.
Daily stressors like work, family, and other obligations can perhaps shift to some degree to lower your overall stress load. Many may like to tell their boss what they really think, but it’s often not the best idea. So you fix what you can fix. Maybe you can adjust your commute to work or how efficiently you work, freeing up more time and thus lowering your stress. This in turn makes your life more aerobic so you can handle other types of stress more, such as the stress of anaerobic workouts. And yes, your body will require less rest.
Rest and recovery can mean actual rest, such as sleep, but also active recovery. Sometimes a very easy aerobic exercise like an easy run or balance work is much better than just taking the day off and lounging around. I think we should all be moving every day—as in, “exercising” every day. This is not plausible for everybody, and as addressed in Part II, various forms of exercise and intensity need to be taken into account. Even just walking can be considered active recovery. Do some bear crawls to mix up the walk (depending on where you’re walking) or do some squats and one-leg balancing while you’re brushing your teeth. One of the many reasons I like MovNat so much is that it can be scaled toward anyone’s training. Balancing and barefoot running (or walking) are great on easy days with lifting, throwing, climbing, and carrying heavy objects left for harder days.
Sleep, of course, is a major factor in recovery, and as the equation states, the more working out and the more stress you’re under, the more rest you will need. The obvious problem here is that the opposite often occurs. The more someone trains, the less they sleep, or the less they’re able to sleep. This is especially true for those under a lot of stress—they sleep less and not as well, most often due to spikes in cortisol throughout the night. My sleep article addresses several sleep conditions, but dealing with daily stress, including dietary stress, will lead to better sleep. This, as you can see, has multidimensional ramifications because the less stress you’re under during the day and the healthier your diet is, the better you sleep—all leading to more productive workouts.
Health First, Performance Second
Health and performance (fitness) are often closely associated with one another, though they shouldn’t be so closely intertwined. Health is not just the absence of some known disease, but your entire body functioning without any problems—that means your body is free of aches and pains, has abundant energy, and your mind is sharp and clear. A healthy individual isn’t injured, constantly sick, or sleeping poorly. Your impression of this may be that nobody is healthy. The fact is that a lot of people aren’t very healthy, but they may be very fit.
As you become more and more fit, your health should also improve, and vice versa. If you change your diet and lifestyle for the better, you will see some positive changes in fitness. You will move more efficiently when you’re healthy, and you’ll naturally be more fit. Unfortunately, as many become more fit, their health suffers—they stress their bodies out too much (anaerobically) or do not recover properly. This excess anaerobic syndrome is the same one that many link with chronic, damaging “cardio” as discussed in Part I. Most train too much, too hard, and since the majority of us aren’t professional athletes, we don’t get to rest and recover as much as we’d like. Overtraining is easy.
Those who only do hard CrossFit workouts and the chronic anaerobic endurance athletes are not very healthy. When the vast majority of workouts are cortisol-inducing activities, the body will break down because there is not enough time in the day to recover. Although that professional athlete may last longer when they have someone training, feeding, and managing their schedule, it eventually catches up with them.
So whatever training program you want to support or bash, remember it all comes down to two things: what you’re trying to accomplish and how it affects your health. Too often, these two parameters do not complement each other. I see way too many injured and unhealthy “athletes” who are training for or have just competed in a half or full marathon. The general misconception is that these athletes are healthy. Far from the truth. (More on this in Part V.) A similar situation of being fit but not healthy occurs with those who only do some hard weights and sprints a few times a week as their only workouts.
Overtrained, Under Conditioned, or Under Rested?
“Overtraining is not possible; you’re just under conditioned.” I remember first hearing a statement like this during the 2006 Tour de France by Floyd Landis, who of course was later disqualified for doping. It’s the “glass half empty, glass half full” idea. Whether you think overtraining is a possibility or not is up to you. I understand some now use the term “overreaching,” which is when one pushes themselves too much and the performance starts to plateau or suffer, but they’re not in the full-blown stage of overtraining. Call it what you like—overtrained, overreached, under conditioned, or under rested—if you’re in any of these categories, you’re doing something wrong.
Injuries typically don’t come out of nowhere. Sure, there are exceptions—traumatic accidents, for example. You may step into a hole while running and sprain your ankle. You may slip while performing a lift. If you’re playing a contact sport, you’re obviously at risk. But the majority of injuries occur because of muscle imbalances resulting from some stress to the nervous system. This is the Sock Doc’s forte, and I am able to address injuries and health problems faster than most would ever expect. Dietary stress, hormonal stress, emotional stress, and physical stress (past unresolved injuries, improper footwear, orthotics, and yes, even harmful [static] stretching habits) all impact the nervous system, causing imbalances in the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which in turn result in patterns of muscle imbalances. It’s these muscle imbalances that cause injures, either locally or elsewhere in your body, especially if they affect how you move (your gait).
So yes, you could be under conditioned to perform a certain activity and end up with an injury. This happens if you’ve never developed your aerobic base but train at too high a heart rate too often and for too long. It’ll also happen if you lift too much weight too often without sufficient recovery. It could happen if you don’t incorporate any or very little aerobic activity into your daily routine. And it could happen if you do too much aerobic and not incorporate sufficient anaerobic endurance or strength into your training.
When you’re injured (or ill), you’re forced to rest. So it’s important to realize some of the warning signs of overtraining—and under conditioning. Read up on them so you can back off and adjust before it’s too late.