1. The programme you are running tells you it is time to take a break for a week or whatever (obvious, but you’d be surprised how many don’t do this – including Yours Baldly, once upon a time),
2. You feel as though you can’t relax until your training for the day is done,
3. You’re getting “deep” aches you can’t shake through food and sleep (will not explain, if you know you know),
4. You want your session to end as soon as or shortly after it begins,
5. You are skipping sets, whole exercises, and/or your warmup/cooldown (the latter being mucho dangerouso),
6. The thought of taking a few days to a week off of hard training provokes feelings of guilt and shame,
7. You’re ravenously hungry most (if not all) of the time,
8. Everything “feels” heavy – even though you are making all of your lifts,
9. You’re very sore in the hours after you train (not DOMS – which typically starts 12+ hours later, I am talking immediately after when you should be feeling fine or better than fine),
10. You’re paranoid you’ll get fat/lose strength/speed/stamina/whatever if you stop training,
11. You are consoooming far more Fitness Content™ than you ordinarily would, knowingly or not, because you are seeking a magic bullet to pull you out of the fatigue-related rut you have found yourself languishing in.
There are more, but those are what came to mind at 0643 this morning.
Anyway.
Something I have noticed is that there is a genuine reluctance among those who take their training seriously to have a break once in a while.
It’s always been this way, however it certainly seems to have gotten a lot worse in recent years. Likely due to the pernicious influence of social media constantly serving you images and videos of bodies that are, frankly, unattainable for anyone who does not want to pump themselves full of drugs and, increasingly, have surgery; let alone lead a fulfilling life outside of training.
Rewind the clock 65, 70 years ago (i.e. back before PED abuse became rampant), and you’ll see far more balanced attitudes not only being promoted but also being modelled by fitness personalities of the day.
Relatively low frequency training, with frequent planned layoffs were standard. Plenty of hard training still got done, but they also left plenty of space to recover from that hard training so they could continue doing it indefinitely (many from this time continued training in broadly the same fashion as they did in their youth into their 60s, 70s, and beyond – something I very much doubt will be the case for today’s fitness dimfluencers).
I don’t know who needed to hear that, but I hope someone, somewhere finds it useful.
Although if you have found yourself trapped in a cycle of training hard only to fall off the wagon and lose your hard-won progress, a lack of planned rest could well be one of (if not the) root cause.
The remedy for that is a full “training toolbox” of sustainable methods (all of which allow – nay, demand you take regular breaks) you can pull from to keep plugging away and, more importantly, moving forward irrespective of whatever else is going on in your life.
To get that, subscribe to The Phil Tyreman Letter.
Learn all about it here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman