Did Your Workout Suck Today?
Did your work out suck today? Everything felt heavy? Totally out of breath during warm ups? Felt like you forgot how to run? Got super tired? I’m here to tell you that it’s pretty normal to have days like this when you are a hard training athlete.
While we are all athletes and expect high achievement from ourselves, sometimes we forget that our bodies are imperfect products of nature and are not robotically engineered pieces of machinery (most of us anyways). Because of this, sometimes our bodies just don’t cooperate with whatever we have programmed. The best thing we can do in those situations is make sure we don’t do anything stupid out of frustration, finish the work out as best we can, and live to fight another day.
The major things to focus on that will help avoid these types of days are sleeping, eating enough nutritious foods that digest easily, and coming to work outs hydrated. Even if you’ve done all these, sometimes things just don’t go your way during training anyways. While psychologically these work outs are never fun, being consistent with your training is the best way to overcome bad workouts.
Being consistent gives you the trust in yourself that there will be another workout in a matter of days or even hours. It provides an opportunity not so far on the horizon to re-attack your goals and be better the next time. Secondly, consistency provides perspective. Athletes who aren’t consistent with their training feel like every workout is do or die. They try to win a championship in a single hour and a half work out…and then don’t come back for two weeks. If that single workout wasn’t your day, it can be demotivating and doesn’t allow you to accumulate a body of work where you can actually evaluate your progress. Almost always, if you are consistent with your training and leading a healthy lifestyle, you will see a positive trend over many workouts. That positive trend is all that we’re after in the training process - not necessarily just a great workout TODAY.
A wise weightlifter once said that 1/3rd of your workouts will be great, 1/3rd will be average, and 1/3rd will suck. So if yours sucked today, don’t worry about it. Stay consistent and keep showing up. The only time we lose in the training process is when we don’t show up.
Best of luck with your training today!
With Thanks,