6/1: RECOVERY IS TRAINING
As many of you have probably guessed, I am a pretty driven person. Between raising a family, working a full-time day job, running the business of gym, training in the gym, competing at the highest level possible, going to a personal trainer every week, stretching at home multiple times every week after class, hitting the chiropractor about every week, and visiting my nutritionist every other month, I have a pretty full schedule.
At 55, I still feel pretty good and still enjoy training hard, but time is still undefeated and I can certainly feel the effects of age, as much as I try to keep them at bay. At 33, I started to feel the effects of needing more time to get back to where I was if I stopped training for a week or more. At 43 the eyes started to go. At 53, recovery has become a challenge.
About 3 years into my previous gym with a partner, we were extremely busy but with very little staff. At that time on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, I would leave work at 4:30, get to the gym at 5:15, have maybe 5 minutes to myself, then teach kids classes for 2 hours, kickboxing for an hour then BJJ for an hour….5:30-9:30 with absolutely no break. If new students came in, I had to sign them up between classes and get someone to lead the next class. At that time, membership agreements were all on paper. After class, I had to clean the gym, enter the agreements into the billing system, throw the loaner gi’s in my car, go home and wash, dry and fold the gi’s before bed, and put them back in my car. I was going to bed 2-3 times per week at 2am. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was literally killing myself. Most every Friday my body shut down just after lunch at work, and many, many days I didn’t even feel safe driving home I was so tired. This went on for at least a year. I was literally taking years off my life, and I knew it.
When I left my engineering job at GM in 2018, it took me over a month before my body recovered from the exhaustion. I completely forgot that it was not normal to be yawning through the day, every day, since I had been doing that for so long. It really, really hit me how bad I had broken my body down and realized I could never go back to that level of stress if I wanted to lead a productive life. If you are in this situation, I pray that you find a way out.
At that time, I really understood the necessity of sleep and recovery because I was so deprived of it. But once my schedule settled down, I was still not giving myself the weekly recovery that I needed. I couldn’t even find peace on Sunday’s because that has always been “paperwork” day, and still largely is, but things have changed.
In the past, I couldn’t find rest on the weekends because I felt guilty if work wasn’t getting done that I felt needed to get down. But now, I have learned to compartmentalize tasks and allow myself the freedom to forget about work when rest time is at hand. I’m not perfect, but I’m better.
Many driven people, including myself, often think that if we are not doing something, we aren’t moving forward. I have come to appreciate the fact that rest and recovery IS part of training. Rest and recovery DOES make you better for a whole host of reasons. When we are rested our bodies and minds perform better. When our bodies rest, they heal. We are no good to anyone if we are not healthy. As we age, we are all going to have to factor in more rest….quality rest. We are going to have to be even pickier about what we eat and drink. What we put in our bodies is also going to have a huge factor on how we recover. I’m learning to give myself a little grace and allow myself the down time I need, the same down time I would tell someone else they need if they were doing what I was doing. We are often our own harshest critics, and I am most certainly mine.
But this week, find time to give yourself grace. Find time to prioritize rest and recovery. You don’t have to make excuses to anyone if after a hard week your priority is to stay on the couch all day because you need to recover. Get refreshed, heal your body, heal your mind, then get back in the ring for the next round!
