
How is your week? Mine has been great! One of my exams passed, and I am really happy. Thanks to all of you who wrote me this week and sorry if you haven’t gotten your answer yet. But I am really busy so it will take me some time to read the messages and answer you back. This week I picked up two questions for the Q&A. One of them is about muscle soreness and workouts. And if muscle soreness is supposed to be the measure of an effective workout. The other one has to do with eating and boredom. How to avoid food indulgence and feelings of guilt.
Hello, Ines!
Very often non training days, become an excuse to be lazy. Sometimes, I don’t even go out of the house all day long, because everything I want to do is rest. My question is how could you resist all the temptations at home and how could you stay away from indulging, because it often happens to eat out of boredom and then I realize that I just overate, without even noticing it. Then I start feeling guilty and instead of feeling good on my rest days, I feel as if I am failing. When I try to encourage myself and say “Ok, it happens to everybody!”, I calm down and I start eating even worse. I really want to cope with my bad habits, so could you give me an advice?
Some time ago I wrote this post, “When the Soul Is Starving, The Body Is Overeating”, and I think that this statement is the base of all problems, people encounter with food.
I decided to answer this comment here, because I get that question on a daily basis. The first thing that impresses me is “staying at home all day long”. Resting has nothing to do with staying at home and this is one of the most wrong understandings. Sometimes, as you can read in the comment above, this kind of “rest” leads to boredom, which is a lot more torturing and exhausting, than if you are actually involved in some activity.
For me, resting is not an equivalent of laziness. Find activities, which bring you pleasure and satisfaction, activities which “feed your soul”. I.e. something that you will be eager to do and something that will bring you positive emotions. Exactly these positive emotions are what makes you feel rested.
Besides that, when it comes to the temptations at home, there are two choices. The first one is to just stay away from buying them. It is hard to eat something, that you haven’t previously bought. So if you still can’t control yourself and approach food consciously, limit the temptations, that you store in your kitchen pantries.
The other solution is to just be more conscious. These moments of unconscious eating and the feeling of guilt that follows, are a result from unconscious living and the automatic actions- actions that are a result of a pre learned model of behavior( I am bored, so I am gonna eat in order to kill some time and feel better).
A friend of mine once told me, that when she was younger, she was trying to catch her father’s attention, while he was working. She told him “ I am bored!”, and he looked at her and answered “ Only boring people, could be bored.” Then she said that since that moment, she has never dared to say that she is bored. And this is so true. There are so many things that you could do, in order to spend your time good, to use it for meaningful activities, instead of just waste your hours, eating and watching TV.
Hey Ines!
Here is my question of the day! Should I be sore after every workout? Sometimes I think people make “soreness” the measure of if they had a good workout, but I hate being sore ALL the time. I know it will happen sometimes, but what should I think?
This is an outstanding question. If I got 1 dollar for every time when somebody asks me if workouts that don’t cause muscle soreness anymore, are still effective, I would be on the top 10 chart of Forbes millionaires.
Muscle soreness is a normal response of an exertion effort and it is a part of the adaptive process, which leads to increased strength, stamina and so forth, in the process of muscle recovery and hypertrophy.
Muscle soreness is a result of microscopic tears in muscle fibers. The quantity of the tears, respectively of the muscle soreness depends on the quantity of the effort and the type of the exercises you perform. It is absolutely normal to have muscle soreness, when you include new exercises in your program or when you drastically increase the effort. But the ore you work out and the more you advance, the less you will have muscle soreness. This wouldn’t mean that your training program is not good. It would mean that you have passed through the initial, let’s say more stressful period of adaptation.
Personally, I rarely have muscle soreness, or I could even say almost never, but my achievements in the gym and my progress, definitely show the effectiveness of my training program!
So do not make muscle soreness, the measure of your workout effectiveness. Concentrate on your achievements in the gym! They are the best indicator!
P.S. If you liked this post, please take a minute and share it with your friends! I’d greatly appreciate it!