Weight Loss Success Tips - I Know I Should Exercise But I Feel Like Crud - What Do I Do?
What do you do when you don't feel your best? You know your body needs to move in order to achieve your healthy and weight loss goals, but you feel sluggish, groggy, congested, headachy, sore, whatever the symptoms, you just feel less than great and you definitely don't feel like exercising.
So what do you do? You certainly have a couple options.
You could push through it and work out as usual.
On the other hand you could keep telling yourself you are sick or sore, or whatever, that you deserve a day off and go back to bed.
These are the two options most people come up with.
They think it must be one or the other.
It is either black or white, in or out, on or off, 100% or nothing.
I know that feeling because that was how I used to be.
If I couldn't work out hard for at least an hour, whether it was because I didn't feel well or because of time constraints-I deemed it wasn't worth working out at all.
I had years of practice as a competitive athlete of pushing through it.
Most coaches back then were of the "no pain, no gain" philosophy...
in fact I still hear that phrase bantered around a lot! We pushed through pain and illness, believing that force was the answer.
When I was in college I remember one coach telling me that working out was a stress on the body and so is illness.
He said that with all the stress of academia that sometimes when our body feels ill we should take the day off from our workouts in order to be able to perform better in the long-run.
So which is right? For years I continued the "push through it" philosophy.
In that process I found that I kept getting injured.
Or I would get so ill that I literally couldn't get out of bed.
This set back my fitness level far more than if I had taken a day off when I first felt the need to ever would.
Does that mean taking the day off and crawling back under the covers at the first sign of the sniffles is the best course? Not necessarily.
There is a third option-and that is to modify your routine so you do some exercise even if it is not the entire workout your normally would do.
Why is this third option a good idea? Sometimes we develop patterns that inhibit our health and fitness goals.
It may be that we subconsciously are resisting attaining our goals or simply we don't enjoy exercising so we are finding ways to avoid it.
If we give ourselves permission to not exercise at all when we don't feel well, we may actually manifest illness or injury so we have a "legitimate" excuse to not workout.
On the other hand, if you disregard the messages from your body that tell you to take it easy, you may also manifest illness or injury, as I did.
So taking a path somewhere in the middle just makes sense.
It gives you an opportunity to learn from your body and eventually you will know when you should crawl back under the covers-metaphorically or literally-and when you should push through it.
So what do you do? You certainly have a couple options.
You could push through it and work out as usual.
On the other hand you could keep telling yourself you are sick or sore, or whatever, that you deserve a day off and go back to bed.
These are the two options most people come up with.
They think it must be one or the other.
It is either black or white, in or out, on or off, 100% or nothing.
I know that feeling because that was how I used to be.
If I couldn't work out hard for at least an hour, whether it was because I didn't feel well or because of time constraints-I deemed it wasn't worth working out at all.
I had years of practice as a competitive athlete of pushing through it.
Most coaches back then were of the "no pain, no gain" philosophy...
in fact I still hear that phrase bantered around a lot! We pushed through pain and illness, believing that force was the answer.
When I was in college I remember one coach telling me that working out was a stress on the body and so is illness.
He said that with all the stress of academia that sometimes when our body feels ill we should take the day off from our workouts in order to be able to perform better in the long-run.
So which is right? For years I continued the "push through it" philosophy.
In that process I found that I kept getting injured.
Or I would get so ill that I literally couldn't get out of bed.
This set back my fitness level far more than if I had taken a day off when I first felt the need to ever would.
Does that mean taking the day off and crawling back under the covers at the first sign of the sniffles is the best course? Not necessarily.
There is a third option-and that is to modify your routine so you do some exercise even if it is not the entire workout your normally would do.
Why is this third option a good idea? Sometimes we develop patterns that inhibit our health and fitness goals.
It may be that we subconsciously are resisting attaining our goals or simply we don't enjoy exercising so we are finding ways to avoid it.
If we give ourselves permission to not exercise at all when we don't feel well, we may actually manifest illness or injury so we have a "legitimate" excuse to not workout.
On the other hand, if you disregard the messages from your body that tell you to take it easy, you may also manifest illness or injury, as I did.
So taking a path somewhere in the middle just makes sense.
It gives you an opportunity to learn from your body and eventually you will know when you should crawl back under the covers-metaphorically or literally-and when you should push through it.
