Should you stick to a full training session even though you feel destroyed? Not Necessarily……
Here’s a little assessment to decide whether it’s just CBF or if training isn’t the best thing for you today.
Total Score /25
Hydration /5 1-Dehydrated to 5 Very Hydrated (1litre per 25kg of bodyweight + 1 Litre p/h of exercise)
Nutrition /5 1-Mal Nourished/super hungry to 5 Ate Very Well (3-5 small home cooked meals per day with all food groups)
Sleep /5. 1- Very Tired to 5 Well Slept (8hrs per night)
Do You Want To Train? /5 1- CBF to 5 Super Psyched
How Sore/ “Domsy” Are You? /5. 1-Kill me now to 5 Completely pain free and recovered.
Final Scores
0-10 Training will do more damage than good, focusing that time on beefing up the other areas will get you further than training will!
10-15 A lite training sessions focusing on better movement may be the right option for you!
15-20 Some training and a lite movement session is a good idea but a hard session will knock you back.
20+ Go For It! Train hard, chase the gains.
Often times people see training to chase better performance as the only option, the thing that will get you progress, they keep beating their head against the wall with little progress when what they really need is to put the effort into what really gets better performance. Recovery.
Maybe your score is a little low to train but you are super psyched, so drink a little more water and eat something healthy, this may push you up into the next category, or maybe not quite because you are a little sore, A proper warm up with some quality movement may reduce the amount of DOMs (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) that you are feeling and wallah you are ready to train.
A training program over the course of weeks should make you tired, it should be a slow progression into fatigue, that is why they have scheduled deload periods in them, for example a 6 week program followed by a week deload but you don’t want to be so fatigued that you are feeling beaten into the ground before you even start your session, if this is happening you do not have the energy to train with quality or quantity and you significantly increase the risk of injury.
You get stronger while you are recovering, not while you are training.
