I want you to picture an empty cup.
Let’s pretend that stress is the liquid filling up the gallon.
What’s in your cup?
Working out, even though it is a POSITIVE STRESS, is still a stressor on our body. Our body can’t differentiate between positive and negative stress. So, let’s fill up the cup slightly (even with working out 3 days a week, that would still only make up a small amount of our stress!).
What about work?
Your job has been super busy lately. You have 3 new projects, have been putting in long hours in the office, and have been running around with your head cut off.
Let’s add more to the cup.
How is your family?
Well your mom is sick, and you have been getting her groceries and running her back and forth between doctors. The kids are in every sport under the sun so you are now a full-time Uber driver, and you and your partner have been arguing about where you want to go on vacation this year.
Let’s add to the cup.
How have you been sleeping?
Not great. With work and family stress, sleep has been hard to come by. You’ve been running around and are feeling run down, and even when you fall asleep you can never stay asleep.
Let’s add a BIG splash to the cup.
Our cup is almost full, and we haven’t even gotten to the forty other factors that can add to our “almost full” cup.
What does all of this mean?
A lot of times, pain is associated with stress. The more stress you have, typically the more beat up your body feels. You don’t recover well, leading to you feeling beat up, sore, and rundown.
For me personally, when I am super stressed out, my “old” injuries flare up even more than usual.
They are sore from the second I wake up until the moment I go to bed. Exercises that used to be pain free, now feel impossible.
Should you freak out if this happens to you?
NO!
Pain doesn’t always mean that something is “broken” or needs to be examined. Typically, this means that our body is just under more stress than usual. For a lot of people, this is seen through lower back tightness, joint pain, or just feeling rundown.
We don’t need to run and get imaging done, jump to the worst case scenario, or completely stop our routine.
You know as well as I do, stress is a constant in our lives, and always will be.
“So what should I do during my workouts, if everything hurts?”
MODIFY what you had planned! Go lighter. Change the movements that were planned to something that doesn’t cause pain. Shorten the session. Spend extra time stretching/warming up.
“But won’t I be wasting time if I’m not working out as hard?”
Long-Term consistency trumps short-term intensity every single time. Again, stress will always be there. If you only worked out, when you had nothing else going on, those workouts would be few and far between.
Learning to navigate how you feel, and the stress you are under, with your workout routine, is one of the best skills you can develop to guarantee you stick to a program.
Next time your cup is filling up, and you want to skip your workout, ask yourself:
“When is my cup not full?”
Life is never going to stop being stressful.
The goal isn’t waiting for less stress.
The goal is learning how to keep moving through it.