Although you have consistently followed through with your training program over the last few months, are you in a complete hole and can’t get going again? What to do to get back into the swing of things?
Take rest days without a guilty conscience
The situation described above is surprisingly common among ambitious competitive athletes. The initial situation is usually similar: training is planned and implemented in a disciplined and precise manner. Your approach your competitions with focus, but at the races themselves you are missing vigor, energy and sometimes even mental freshness and motivation. If you find yourself in a similar situation, the first thing to do is to take a break from training for several days. Then it’s time to investigate the cause.
Hitting the reset button is not always easy. Often it is exactly the described focus that has driven you into such a situation. Discipline, willpower and consistency are certainly important in athletic training. However, you also need to stay relaxed and trust your intuition. Listen to your body and perhaps skip a workout now and then when you don’t feel like it.
The realization that a few rest days would be necessary is probably not entirely new to most athletes. Never the less it often brings with it a guilty conscience and the fear of losing fitness if you don’t train. however this is sometimes necessary. So: don’t be afraid to plan a break without sports and training pressure. You will see that the rest will give your body energy again and that the lack of training will not have any negative effects; after all, you have trained enough in the months before. When you start training again, concentrate more on fast workouts (intervals) and leave out long workouts. In this way you can take advantage of your freshness and be able to complete a few good competitions.
Text from FITforLIFE– This blog post was provided to us by the Swiss magazine FIT for LIFE. If you want to read regularly informative knowledge articles in the field of running and endurance sports, click here.
To see how 2PEAK helps you calculate your training and rest days dynamically, read how the 2PEAK battery works. You might also be interested in why we often feel tired and weak.