One of the most important qualities we want to develop in our participants during the programme is the ability to listen and understand their bodies. You have successfully completed the first half of the programme, but there is a lot more for you to come. The more intense the exercise are the more you need to pay attention to what your body tells you. Believe us, you do need to pay attention because it both makes your training more effective and safer and helps you to avoid unnecessary injuries and breaks in training.
I bet that you have already experienced the feeling, when training does not feel right and you'd better stop than go on or, otherwise, you felt elated and wanted to move mountains. Such things happen and they are so personal and irregular that you cannot count on them in your training programme with given numers of reps and sets.
Suggest you started your training session and feel that something is going wrong. Probably it is a knee ache or your breath is harder than usually, anything like that. You can ignore the signs and keep doing your sets and reps but ignoring the signs might lead you to injuries like sprain or dislocation or anything similiar. Your body alarms you, telling you that it does not want to train today as much as you want. You have to listen and change your plans accordingly. If you insist, then it has to yield and dig deep and god knows where it might lead you.
However you also have to learn to distinguish these ocassions from cases of plain laziness. That is what it means to listen to your body. Here are some of the signals you have to pay attention to:
Pain, during or after exercising
We have already mentioned that you must not workout through pain or if pain accurs right after you finish the training. One of the main features of WorkOut is natural movements which we have been doing everyday through out our lives from the moment we were born, that is why you should not have pain with proper technique. If there is pain then something has gone wrong.
There are multiple reasons of pain accurance, but we will not be discussing them right now. We can only tell you, once again, that you must not try cheating pain with pills or anything like that but you must find the source of the pain and fix it.
Unpleasant feelings in joints and muscles (pulls, clicks and so on)
If you have not warmed up well enough before the main session your joints can click or crackle during your training, but it should go away after the first several reps. Also these feelings should not be discomforting or unpleasant. Otherwise you might probably have a more serious issue than you think and every next rep only exacerbating it.
The solution is simple. If you feel that something has gone wrong or you just do not like the way you feel then you had better stop. If a click is caused by inflammation then rest is the best option for you right now and if you do not want to then stop and get back in a couple of days. If you keep training through pain then you only make your condition worse lengthening the time you will needed to recover. If you really ignore the issue and keep working out you might get into much bigger trouble instead of a small one.
When you are planning to do WorkOut all your life (to keep yourself fit and healthy and strong and so on), a couple of days of rest will not hurt you, so stay flexible. Bruce Lee's famous saying goes like this: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water.”
General tiredness (tiredness, irritability, insomnia or sleepiness)
We do not always feel ourselves 100% ready to challenges. There are times when you have a training session scheduled, but you feel tired and/or sleepy from accumulated fatigue and so on. Is it worth training in a condition like this?
There is no clear answer to that. You may skip the session as well as make it just easier. When you are tired you cannot concentrate well on technique and loss of concentration increases risk of injury.
Natural causes such as low or high atmospheric pressure and its rapid changes, magnetic storms can cause feeling of fatigue too. Do you have to try to squeeze 100% out of your body? We would rather say no than yes since your body is already under stress and putting more pressure on it will not help.
Our programme was developed the way to make you able to exercise every day using adaptive number of reps in each set of the circuit, but to make this scheme work you need to determine these numbers on your own. If you come up with lower numbers then the programme will not be as effective as planned, and if you go for higher numbers, then you will not be able to recover in time for the next session. You have to find out the right numbers for you by trials and error.
The same principle applies to technique. We present the most common version based on human biomechanics. Theoretically it should fit most of you, but we are all different and the common version might not work for you. Here you have to define what exactly the basic movement is and make changes to it according to your abilities and limitations.
<url="http://workout.su/100dw">100 Days WorkOut - Contents</url>
