On my daily runs, I always checked in with my body to see how it was doing. Lungs are fine, heart is fine, stamina is fine, legs are. But even without the ice barrel, I used every tool I had at my disposal to avoid injury. If I had a barrel or something that could keep its cool without me wasting tons of water every day, I would totally use them for post-run recovery. The only I didn't do was ice baths, something I really like but haven't got the capacity at home to do. I also made sure I slept as well as possible and even wore compression socks for running after the runs to enhance recovery. This involved warm-ups – sometimes, I used a massage gun to energise my calves pre-run – post-run foam roller sessions and the use of my favourite recovery tool, the Therabody RecoveryAir JetBoots. Even before I started, I knew my legs won't like the training load increase, so I followed a rigorous recovery schedule from day 1 to ensure I minimise the risk of injury as much as possible. The "make sure my body was ready" part in the above sentence refers to recovery, the most important part of this challenge, at least as far as I was concerned. I tried to balance the two approaches by not wavering from the original goal of running a 10k every day but doing my best to make sure my body was ready for the sessions every day. You can do fitness challenges in a sensible way, keeping a keen eye on your body and monitoring/working around any sore spots, but admittedly, that's not quite as exciting as an all-out effort. If anything, it's dangerous and pointless – yet, people can't stop reading about fitness challenges, so people keep on doing them. This is not healthy or beneficial for your physical development. The main problem with fitness challenges is that they usually overload one area of the body (often one muscle group) and neglect others entirely. However, every time I do these challenges, I keep thinking I don't want to do them anymore as they are just silly. I did 100 pull-ups for a week before and even attempted the 10,000-swing kettlebell challenge. I seldom do fitness challenges and when I do, it's because I got myself into a training rut.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |