How to Give Yourself a Break with Progressive Overload & Periodization
Rest and recovery are critical to pursuing excellence in all its forms.
My Apple Watch won't give me a break.
I mean, without overriding the notification settings or manually manipulating my goals, my Watch will push me to go faster, farther, and harder day after day, week after week, year after year.
I'll get a tap tap on my wrist that chides me for not moving as much as yesterday. Or a tap tap that reminds me of the monthly challenge It selected for me. Or a tap tap that offers praise for exceeding my normal activity.
A couple of years ago, I turned off almost all of the fitness-related tap taps. I did it because that relentless push for more and better was actually hurting rather than helping my body.
The human body—and I know this is going to sound wild—has limitations.
It's true! It turns out that bodies need sleep, food, water, etc., or they'll eventually stop functioning. Bodies also need time for rest and recovery in order to take advantage of the training they endure. To get faster or go further, you need to take it easy with surprising frequency.
Unfortunately, the world around us makes it difficult to maintain the bioregulation that’s critical to pursuing excellence. Instead, we live in a state of bio-deregulation brought on by our always-on, hustle-harder culture and 24/7 access to markets, devices, and information. We don't make time for rest or sleep, we squeeze it in when we can or succumb to it when we can't do anything else.
As a result, our performance suffers. But more importantly, we don’t have the capacity to go all in when we want to. We lose the ability to feel satisfied with our work(out) because we’ve settled for failing at the impossible rather than pursuing excellence, to paraphrase Audre Lorde.1
Now, while this is not a fitness publication, and I am not a fitness expert, I'm going to get a bit nerdy with a few of the nuts and bolts of training. Then, I'll tie it all back to how we can work with less strain, honor our limitations, and pursue excellence.
If this little detour into working with more ease by way of endurance training is intriguing, don't miss the workshop on Thursday, June 13 at 1pm EDT/10am PDT
where I'll dive even deeper into the nerdery!
Or, if you’d like to explore your beliefs about rest with me this summer,
check out Summer Seminar.
No rest, no gain
While the familiar adage is 'no pain, no gain,' it's more appropriate to say, 'no rest, no gain.' Unfortunately, that doesn't rhyme. But it is true. Rest and recovery help keep athletes physically healthier, mentally fitter, and better adapted to perform at higher and higher levels. Rest gives us the ability to really push ourselves when that's the goal.
The authors of Peak Performance, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, put it this way:
If we never take “easy” periods, we are never able to go full throttle and the “hard” periods end up being not that hard at all.
Weekend warriors and elite athletes alike prioritize structured rest—on a workout-by-workout, week-by-week, and month-by-month basis.
This is what infuriates me about the Apple Watch's lack of a built-in recovery function. It takes for granted that I need a push to go harder but not a push to take a break. It assumes that pushing myself is the challenge when the reality is honoring the need for rest is the biggest obstacle of all.
Ideally, my Watch would allow me to select days of the week as my typical rest days or have a single-click feature that would allow me to lower my goals for the day and turn off activity notifications. Instead of choosing a 'challenge' each month that pushes my edge just a little more, It might challenge me to do less for a month. Something like, "You've really been putting in the miles over the last few months! This month your challenge is to limit your runs to no more than 15 miles a week."
I should be able to earn an award for rest and recovery, goshdarnit!
My guess is that you don’t need a push to go harder or faster at work, either. Even if you aren’t happy with what you’ve accomplished at the end of the day, it’s not for lack of productivity. More of us—especially the recovering overachievers and goal-oriented strivers—could use a tap tap to remind us to take it easy.
Pursuing growth without overtraining
Athletes of all stripes tend to be pretty goal-oriented people. The goals we set aren’t always (or even often) about winning a medal or breaking a personal record. Instead, they’re often variations on curiosity: “I wonder if I could…” I wonder if I could finally do a pull-up. I wonder if I could complete a 5k without walking. I wonder if I could play softball again.
These goals encourage us to push ourselves, and that’s great. But mix that with our productized, gamified, individualist “culture” of health, and we’ve got a recipe for pushing ourselves straight into the ground. Been there, done that.