When Momentum Becomes Destructive

It’s remarkable how much your body can adapt to training stimulus. The key to the whole thing working though is recovery.  That’s where the adaptation actually occurs, and without adequate rest and recovery, you’re leaving performance on the table.

That’s why yesterday, even though I was on a hot streak, and I really wanted to keep my streak going, and film myself doing some easy squats, I knew a rest day would be more beneficial. It had been 12 days straight of squatting, and my body was quite used to the stimulus and volume, but I was thinking ahead.

Even though I felt good, by the end of this week, my body could have started feeling too fatigued or sore and achy. To hedge against that, I decided to skip the squats yesterday.

I’ve learned my lesson from riding the momentum too much with running. There’s been many times I’m having a great training week, I roll it into the next week without skipping a beat, to only end up taking 4 days off the following week cause I’m trashed.

Going into this Easy Strength, I wasn’t sure if I would take a rest day or not. Rest days, are of course an integral part of the plan as written, but I like to dabble in the extremes. After all, each of the 12 workouts has taken me less than 10 minutes start to finish and I always have the equipment readily available. Making it a daily practice was part of the appeal for me.

In closing, I felt like if I had squatted yesterday, I would have been doing it only to keep the streak going. The real goal here is to get freaky strong, so in keeping the goal the goal, and not letting momentum become destructive, I broke the streak and took and rest day, and today, I feel invigorated because of it.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain