No Category selected Tuesday, July 29, 2008

    Tuesday, July 29, 2008

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    Enjoy your body!!!
    I need to remind myself this from time to time; the need is more frequent in the days/weeks/ (God forbid) months I get to have OFF.
    For many athletes, at any level – the oh-so-powerful mind can have us believing that within days our body is ridding itself of all accumulated muscle, and that any softer areas have most certainly transformed into fat by now. Ugh! And don’t even get me started on ones “certainty” of a complete loss of speed-endurance.
    Yesterday, one of my training partners wrote me an email: “I’m in a battle right now with losing muscle weight and gaining fat. Man I don’t wanna get fat!”
    I respond quickly, asking her how she has decided that she is in this battle.
    “Well I figured my shorts fit looser yesterday,” she explains, “but that could be just my mind thinking it … it has only been a week after all….”
    The thing about all this is that I completely understand how she feels.
    I am right there sitting next to her on this “I am feeling less-than-fit” boat.

    After a quick random online-search for [“Taking time off” + “I feel fat”] I find threads on messages boards with athletes complaining about this exact topic.
    “I HATE taking time off!!” one user writes “I know I need to, but I feel the fat returning and my muscles shrinking!! *laughs* Is it in my head??
    Luckily, someone with some sense is also surfing the net:
    “Your muscles are NOT going to shrink; they will not atrophy as quickly as you think.  I actually recommend you take time off!”

    Well said, well said.
    Because no athlete should ever risk experiencing the dreaded: Burnout
    .

    Let us thank our coaches and our own self-discipline.
    Here’s to time-off — a blessing in disguise!

    The body is our temple, and while sometimes we might feel that taking time-off is a form of self-neglect, we need to give our head a shake and realize that it’s the time-off that will help our muscles regenerate and maybe even promote getting some extra rest.  All this, so we come back feeling better and faster than ever.