Rest, Flexibility and Variety for Longevity – Part 2

May God grant you all the blessings he has in store for you. Today let’s finish talking about rest in your training. We’ve already established that trying to force the body to work on a schedule its not ready for, or continually pushing down a path when you’re injured will just lead to more injury. That you need to be confident enough to train when you need to and to learn your won body well enough to know when that is.

Now let’s talk about another two keys to training longevity. Actual sleep. I’ve been talking about rest in the context of rest days, how you space your hard training, how well you’re recuperating, etc. But remember that sleep in the most potent, most necessary form of rest. Take charge of your environment and your life so that you’re getting the actual sleep you need. If that means you have to be disciplined about when you go to bed or making sure that things are dark and quiet, that’s great, do what you need to do to get the job done. If you’re getting quality sleep most of the time and training to increase your vitality, strength and endurance, then those days when you do have to miss some sleep won’t matter and you’ll handle them like a champ. Constant sleep depravation leads to over-training and premature body breakdown. This is a simple factor you can control so get hold of it.

Now… variety in training. Another factor to training longevity is not doing the same thing, the same way, forever. I talk a lot about consistency in training and you do need to have a few major things that you constantly come back to, to gauge and actually get long-term progress in. But sometimes even those things can use a few weeks break. Greater amount of variety you build into your training the less total wear and tear you put on your joints, and other susceptible to over-use parts of the body. Variety is actually a kind of rest in training. Even those people who highly tout high rep body exercises to be the end all –be all of exercise, must build in variety. The ones who don’t suffer the same overuse injuries as the ones who lift heavy weights. Constantly presenting your body with new challenges, conquering them and then moving on to different challenges that still maintain your training and conditioning levels keeps training fresh in your mind and your body motivated, not beaten up. This is a big reason why we include large amounts with different exercises in our training materials. The principle we’re training is always the same, but the tools change. The next time you’re run down in training, do one of these couple of things:

• Make sure you’re getting good sleep.
• Take an extra day off
• Do light joint mobility exercises to wake the body up, but not stress it.
• Find something new to try that creates the same training effect, but builds new excitement in the mind and different stress on the body.

Keeping these things in mind, you can train for a lifetime.

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