Rest and Recovery
We’ve all missed a class because we have a
lot on, we’re too tired or we just aren’t ‘feeling it’ and I can imagine a lot
of us beat ourselves up about it… but why? Rest and recovery, both physical and
mental are extra important.
Once we’ve got ourselves into a routine,
it’s difficult to give ourselves a day off.
When we don’t take the time to rest and
recover, we’re at risk of ‘overtraining’. Overtraining doesn’t necessarily mean
we’re training a lot more than we usually do, it could just mean we’re not
rested enough to carry on with our normal routine day-in-day-out.
When I’m feeling washed out and deflated, I
like to take a bath, use all manner of lotions and potions, and go to bed early.
If I really don’t feel like missing a class, I might just attend a Thursday
class rather than my usual Monday one. It’s all about listening to your body and
your mind and knowing when it needs a bit of time to play catch up.
Once I actually took about 7 months off the
pole because I’d over-trained and damaged both wrists. I kept thinking the pain
would just go away, that I was capable of more than one class a week and that I
should keep at the same pace as everyone else. The result? I ended up having to
have steroid injections in my wrists because they were so angry and inflamed.
Your body indicates pain for a reason. Of course it’s natural to ache a little
after class but pain felt, in the same place, week on week shouldn’t be
ignored. Rest up. If that doesn’t work, go and see your doctor or a
physiotherapist and address the problem.
I was surprised to learn that when I
returned to pole class all those months later, thinking I wouldn’t be able to
do anything… that I actually felt stronger than ever. I was no longer
frightened to try things because of dodgy wrists that felt like they might give
out at any moment. I became confident that my body was working for me again and
it showed in my progress. Now, whenever I think my body is getting overtired, I
remember how essential it is to listen to it, give it the rest and recovery
time/attention it craves and what it will do in the long run.
Rest and recovery doesn’t have to mean taking months off. If you
can pay more attention to better rest and recovery, a little more frequently,
it might mean you don’t have to miss classes at all. Perhaps you can afford to
have a sports massage every few weeks. It could even be as simple as putting a
nemesis move to bed for a while thus ‘spreading the load’ during training. Maybe
you could do an extra 10 minutes cooling down and stretching after each class,
focusing on areas of your body that
give you trouble to kick-start the
recovery process.
Listen to your body; no one can hear it
quite like you can.
C x