Going Too Hard?

Trying to Catch Up? Find A Balance to Avoid Super-Intense Workouts in A Pandemic.

Before covid-19 struck, the adage used to be, ‘Go Hard or Go Home!’ But right now, with the stay-at-home directive in many places or extended restrictions most people are stuck at home and going extremely hard with super-intense workouts just because they have all the time.

It’s medically correct to focus on your mental and physical health during these extreme times. However, experts believe that high-intense workouts can instigate mind and body risks.

How do high-intense exercises affect your health?

It’s okay to add a challenge to your regular exercise routine. It’s part of any successful fitness endeavor. But, in the current state of affairs, it could be an essential move to reduce your exertion levels when exercising, the duration of aerobic endurance exercises, and the weights you lift.

By doing that, you’ll be looking after your emotional and mental health plus your physical well-being. Remember, it would be a huge diss-service if your health were impacted, yet you are at home in the best interest of your health and others.

The coronavirus pandemic has already placed you in a stressed or anxious state. When you prioritize intense workouts, significant caloric burns, and maximum heart rates, you reduce the physical returns on the exercises accomplished. And this can cause potential injury, especially if you are not employing recovery strategies.

What are the appropriate recovery strategies?

According to fitness professionals, psychological and physiological stressors blend. And when stress and workload increases, your biological urge for recovery increases as well.  It’s that recovery that enables your body to become adaptable to exercise, grow healthier and more robust.

For one, if you are a regular exerciser and doing long-duration workouts, applying appropriate recovery strategies like foam rolling, hydrating, resting, and walking around the neighborhood would be healthy. Secondly, watch out for your diet by eating balanced foods.

Without the proper recovery, you can land into hormonal imbalance, nutritional problems, and physical fatigue. Much as workouts help your immune system, going too hard with no or little rest might put your body at risk for infection. And this is especially true when you throw the current covid-19 worries and the increased body workload into the mix.

So, here’s how to precisely find a healthy balance:

• Adjust Your Expectations

Long, and intense exercises can be part of your exercise routine while exercising at home. But right now, you may not receive the same results as before. That may because you might not have been visiting the gym due to the coronavirus pandemic. Consequently, you’ve lost some endurance and strength. Another reason may be because you are not sleeping well, stressed up, or having unstable mental health.

Whichever the reason, don’t worry, because there is no better time to exercise self-compassion than now. And again, the ultimate objective of workouts is to watch your mental and physical health, which you are doing now. Remember, the benefits you expect to gain from working out are not reliant on your present ability or fitness levels.

• Aim at Exercises You Enjoy

By engaging in workouts you find most gratifying; you automatically approach exercises with a feel-good instead of a ‘torture-my-body’ mentality.

Unfortunately, though, with most fitness centers and gyms closed and some opening slowly, you may not have space or equipment you normally have for your workouts. It’s natural to have some feeling of frustration. Try to aim at how you can achieve the best enjoyment out of the resources you have. Do you like cardio? Yoga? Strength? Plyometrics? Circuits? Or do you even love long resting periods between sets? Use such questions to attain the highest enjoyment.

• Focus on Processes Rather Results

Process goals include things such as; ‘Perform a hundred push-ups daily’ or ‘Do thirty minutes of abdominal crunches in the morning’ while outcome/result goals involve things such as, ‘Master a handstand’ or ‘Lose twenty pounds.’ The former is more appropriate to maintain a balance between your exercises and intensity.

Take a sec to consider your current workout goals. It’s human nature to have some results in your mind. However, if these outcomes are all result-oriented, think through them and see how you can split them into doable actions or processes – those things that you know, if you give your best shot, you can wholly do!

• Alternate Workout Days

A primary way to strike a balance between recovery and workout intensity is to apply the high-low method. If you perform a high-intensity exercise today, do a low-intensity workout tomorrow. For instance, if you are a runner, perform a tempo run on a particular day and let it be followed with a comfortable, slow recovery run the following day.

What’s more, if you choose to strength train, think of switching muscle group worked on. This move is especially applicable if you exercise four or five times every week. One of the most popular splits includes cycling between pull, push, and lower-body days. To allow sufficient recovery, do not exercise similar muscles back to back.

If you are doing multiple kinds of exercises, it’s still critical to vary intensity, whether you are interchanging between cycling and online workout sessions. So, if you have a super-intense circuit on a particular day, the following day would involve a light cycling exercise.

• Be in Control of Your Exercises

While online exercises could be an excellent place to begin your fitness journey, remember that you are free to customize the sessions according to your likes and needs. You would want to alternate sets and reps, switch one or two exercises, or adjust equipment used in light of the equipment at your disposal.

By choosing the exercises you love doing, rather than following an online program, you enjoy your activities and maintain a healthy balance between workout intensity and recovery. More importantly, you create a workable longer-lasting relationship with workouts.

The Take-Away

Okay, where do those workout insights leave you? Go easy, ditch super-intense workouts, and find a balance that will still leave you feeling challenged. Exercise and Diet are as important as ever in the covid-19 world.

Even better, contact StrategyFitness for a double dose to balance your overall wellness.