overtraining

Run. Eat. Don’t Repeat.* How to break the exercise-to-eat cycle [Reader Question]

February 14, 2012

I think this guy is on to something: he just condensed the whole eat-exercise cycle down to one picture-perfect moment of glory!  You need to eat to live. You also need to exercise to live. But do you eat and exercise to live or do you live to eat and exercise? Silly question but it’s a fine line, easily crossed, from the former to the latter. Especially for those of us compulsive types who tend to think that if some is good then more must always be better. You don’t have to have read this blog for very long to [...]

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How Do You Know When to Push and When to Rest?

January 30, 2012

Disaster struck at the gym this morning. We were doing the P90X  fitness assessment to prepare for February’s Great P90X 2 Experiment (I know!! Squee!!!) that we start Wednesday. The test has you check your performance against the P90X standard in pull-ups, push-ups, in-and-outs (abs), vertical jump, biceps curl max, wall sit, flexibility and a high-intensity cardio interval to check how quickly your heart rate recovers, to see if you are fit enough to do the workout. Needless to say, the test to do the workout is a workout in and of itself. But us being us, we had to [...]

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Muscle Soreness: Busting the “No Pain No Gain” Myth

November 20, 2011

Pretty sure this is about to be “bad sore.” Great news: After about a year of stagnation I broke my deadlift personal record! By a lot! While this was awesome and made me strut around like Ashton Kutcher in a sorority house, two problems became immediately apparent: 1. I did a whole set at my new weight which means, as Gym Buddy Krista put it, “Clearly you haven’t been pushing yourself! If we’d known you had that in you… Never again will we let you get away with a wussy deadlift.” (Side note: for some reason the deadlift has always [...]

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Research Says My Workout May Be To Blame For Forgetting My Son At The Gym.

July 26, 2011

See? All that exercise made her forget which way gravity works. Happens to me all the time. It turns out that Sammy Sosa and Floyd Landis may not be lying – new research says they may reallynot remember how all those drugs got in their system. Apparently all the exercise got to ‘em. For myself, not being a professional athlete, I thought my steadily declining memory was all my children’s fault. Seriously, when you have to remember the exact location of 4 sippy cups, 3 lovies, and 6 flip-flops at all times things like the periodic table and who was president [...]

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I’m Having a Metabolic Reaction

February 2, 2009

Today I experienced one of those weird occurrences that have baffled me ever since I seriously got into fitness – call it the Bermuda Triangle of Exercise, if you will. Just like Amelia Earhart – but less heroic and revolutionary and without the rubber helmet (just what exactly was that supposed to protect you from anyhow?) – today I awoke to a morning just like every other morning, not knowing that by the end of the day I’d be in the grip of a natural phenomenon that science is at a loss to describe. CrossFitters, with their characteristic understatement, have [...]

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Great Fitness Experiment for October: Low Volume

October 1, 2008

“Mildly obsessed.” This was Kelly T’s, of Grounded Fitness, personal assessment of me and one I take as quite the compliment. Although I think she underestimates me. I’d call me “majorly obsessed.” And if I’m being really honest I’d call me a bit of a compulsive exerciser. Which can be a problem. As a few of you delicately pointed out in regards to my disappointing kettlebell results. So, October’s Great Fitness Experiment is all about dialing down the crazy and trying something new for me: a low volume workout. In August, I was the cardio queen (not to be confused [...]

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