The Flip Side

Here is a story that you are probably familiar with.

It's five o'clock. You have done your due diligence to your duties as a functioning member of society. You have done the job and you have done it well.

Take a moment to applaud yourself. It's cool. I'll wait.

Because America is on a big time health kick, you decide that you're going to go the gym tonight. You've made a habit of going, and you feel like you might just do awesome tonight. Your scale hasn't moved very much, but it doesn't matter. Tonight's the night where something awesome happens.

Now, this story splits a little bit depending on who you are. If you're a woman, you probably wander over to the treadmill because you ate your salad, and then you accidentally had a breadstick. You have officially landed at 1201 calories, and that just won't do.

If you're a dude, you are probably burning to look like Ryan Reynolds, or Chris Evans or any of the other built stars. And you totally know how it's gonna happen. Yep. Men's Muscular Magazine, or whatever periodical you subscribe to, has listed a perfect, six day split routine where you work on one part one day and another the next. And your'e good about it. You don't even skip leg day.

Either way, we can draw these stories back together along a single common thread: the odds are really good that they've been hitting the gym every day this past week.

And you feel like you have to. You don't compromise on the other areas of your life - you still have to work, you still have your social life to consider. You can do it all.

Of course you can't.

Maybe it won't happen today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or even in the next week. But something will go wrong. You'll start to notice that your lifts aren't moving as smoothly as they were before, or that your runs leave you more tired than they used to. The vitality and health that you feel like you should have will not be there.

And the temptation is to say that it's not normal, it's a mistake, it won't work that way and you can just power through it. But your body isn't going to let you get away with that.

Thus, we are brought to the other side of the coin: active rest.

Pictured Above: Not Active Rest

I'm gonna blow your mind a little bit. You don't get stronger or faster when you work out. Strength and speed and power and all that jazz are adaptations to stress. Exercise is the stressor. And when you are stressed, the best way to recover is to get some rest.

Resting is the other side of intensity. Where you push with the utmost intensity, you stress yourself to a greater degree. Your body responds by recovering you beyond that threshold, to prepare for the next bout of stress. This, in turn, allows you to be more active, which necessitates further rest. It's a virtuous cycle.

But on the other hand, who really, truly wants to sit around and do nothing all day? One day, yeah, that's fun. But it will lose its charm, I promise. And besides, you're working your body hard to get the adaptations you want. Don't you deserve the chance to see it in action?

Hence, active rest. Active rest is the idea of putting your body through the motions. You're not looking to stress yourself, but you are looking to get your blood flowing, and the nutrients flowing from one place to the next.

And the neat thing is it can be anything you want. You can go for a walk, go for a hike, play some Ultimate, ride a bike. Whatever it takes that you enjoy doing that gets the blood pumping. It'll work.

So! What kind of stuff do you do when you workout? And what kind of stuff would you like to do for fun to relax from the stress?