When Kirsten Ruliffson met with a personal trainer in February, she expected to hear that she needed to work out longer, faster and harder if she really wanted to cut down on the body fat that had stayed stubbornly put for two years.
But what she really heard was just the opposite: That to truly achieve her health and fitness goals, she needed to take a break from her near-daily high-intensity classes and find more ways to let her muscles repair and keep her heart rate low instead.
Huh?
"I was always wired to [to believe] the higher the intensity, the more progress you're going to make," says Ruliffson, a 39-year-old personal trainer-turned-Realtor near Minneapolis.
But because that theory wasn't proving true, Ruliffson obeyed, trading hot yoga for restorative yoga, swapping interval-training classes for leisurely stationary bike rides and tending to her sleep schedule as religiously as her gym schedule. As a result, she's beginning to see the changes in strength and muscle definition she'd literally been chasing for years. "I can tell … it's making a huge difference," she says.
Less Is More
Ruliffson is a minority in the U.S., where 4 out of 5 adults aren't even meeting the minimum recommendations for physical activity. Still, stories like hers are all too familiar to exercise and mental health professionals who frequently see people sabotaging their physical and mental health by working out too often, too intensely or both.
"Six to seven out of 10 [clients] I actually have to tell to back off," says Ruliffson's trainer, Brooke Rozmenoski, the group training coordinator and nutrition coach at Life Time New Hope in Minnesota. "We need to figure out when it's good to push it harder and back off, and if they're pushing harder all the time, they're actually doing their body [more harm] than good."
Not only is rest important to stave off injury and allow damaged muscles to repair and grow, but "overtraining syndrome," as it's described in some research, can compromise the nervous, hormonal and immune systems, and affect mood. For Ruliffson, training only in high-intensity zones had sabotaged her body's ability to effectively burn fat, which is mostly used to fuel low-intensity exercise. "Before knowing all of this," she says, "[low-intensity exercise] seemed really boring and a waste of time."
Some excessive exercisers can even experience some of the same dangerous features of addiction, including needing more and more to achieve the same high, feeling out of control and continuing to exercise even when it's causing harm, says Dr. Elizabeth Joy, a sports medicine physician in Salt Lake City who specializes in eating disorders. "Instead of spending time at work or even with family or friends," she says, "you start to see exercise as one of the only things that they can do."
Withdrawing With Care
Dialing back on exercise for any reason isn't always easy. "Withdrawal from exercise is a very real thing," Joy says. "There are physical and mental consequences."
Read More
http://health.usnews.com/wellness/fitness/articles/2017-05-08/how-to-dial-back-exercise-without-going-nuts
