Thursday, October 18, 2007

Enjoying the Fruits of Your Labor

Duders, I'm slacking today. For reasons mysterious and untold, I've just been sitting back and playing some videogames. I have this productivity compulsion that doesn't normally allow me to enjoy that.

I've been slacking this week in the gym. Really slacking, meaning not going. No weightlifting at all. I developed a pain in my bicep from weighted chins that told me that my low-rep cycle is over, and then I realized that I haven't taken a week off in a long time, at least half a year. So, though I feel guilty every day, I just do some cardio at home and I'm not lifting until next week, when I start a full-body insanity workout to shake things up.

So the topic of today is being able to enjoy your well-deserved treats. Mary Anne left a comment last Friday about exercise allowing her to eat what she wants guilt free, and I mostly agree with her. Can you do it? When you know that you've had a great week of both diet and exercise and you know you deserve a cheat, you might even be in a place where a cheat will physically help you, can you enjoy it, or do you feel guilty anyway? Can you enjoy time off from the gym that your body actually needs?

My obsessive nature gives me a hard time. That's normally a good thing, but not in the above mentioned circumstances.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The thing about time off is, with my allergies affecting my life as they do, I can never be totally sure that I'm slacking off because I need to. Would I feel better if I pushed on through? The only way to be certain would be to push myself and then crash or not. The last thirty years have been a one woman clinical trial in walking that line.
I come across a lot of motivational advice along the lines of "Make yourself exercise because you'll feel great afterwards You know you will." Well, I don't know any such thing. I remember how surprised I was when I got to the point where walking a mile left me feeling better than when I started. I grew up despising atheletes because I assumed they wouldn't put themselves through all that pain if they didn't want fame and admiration. (My whole family is so anti-competitive we might as well be Quaker.) So learning that they might do it because it felt good was a surprise.

Mary Anne the dog lifter

Jeff said...

Debate was my high school sport. I started lifting in my early twenties because I got a gym discount through my employer and was tired of being so skinny. It took quite a while for me to link the afterglow to the exercise. I'd spent too many years thinking of it as embarrassing torture.