FitView: Take The Week Off
By Efren Martinez
You are faithful in your daily fitness routine. Each day you work out and although you switch it up it seems that you’re not seeing any new results. Yes, you’ve plateaued. It does not have to be this way. Although in most cases it is true that if you stop working out for three days you start to lose your fitness conditioning. That’s OK! It’s like this, sometimes you have to take one step back to go three steps forward. If your workouts have become easier for you over time and you’re asking yourself at bedtime, did I run 8 miles this morning and just forget? It’s time to take a week off.
Unlike tapering off slowly before a race, taking an entire week off can have some very positive results in your fitness endeavors and overall attitude. What I’ve found is that if you take a week off from fitness your body starts to lose its daily fitness memory of some sort. Not to worry muscle has memory! Meaning that your strength and muscles will come back after taking long periods of time off from working them out.
So go ahead and take that week off from fitness. Do other things that don’t involve fitness but still are centered in a healthy way of life. You’ll find that when you come back to your fitness routine after a week it will be more challenging than it was the last time you worked out and that’s a good thing. You always want to feel a bit of exhaustion and some good fitness pain after each workout. This means that your body benefited the most from your workout. You’ll also find that doing this a few times a year will improve your yearly fitness results as well as open your mind to other cool things in life outside of your same weekly regimen. That’s just straight-up good and healthy. Give it a try, you’ll be glad you did.
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