It's okay to take your time

The magic is in the in-between

Dear readers,

Here’s something counter-intuitive you may or may not know:

Working out (eg. going for a run, lifting weights in the gym, etc.) doesn’t actually make you fitter or stronger by itself.

Those improvements to your system actually happen in-between workouts.

It happens when you rest and allow yourself to recover.

The workout is just the stimulus. The bit that tells your body ‘hmm, maybe we need to do some upgrade around here’.

Now, what has that got to do with anything?

There is a point to why I’m sharing this, which I’ll circle back to in a moment, but first, let me tell you about my Christmas present.

Last year my wife and I gifted each other heart-rate monitors. I’m not sure if it counts as a gift if you’re buying each other the exact same thing with the money from your joint account, but hey, I enjoyed unwrapping it Christmas morning all the same.

So now, each morning, I strap the monitor around my chest for a few minutes and it will gives me my Recover Score for the day.

This score tells you how well your body is recovering which can then guide you on what type of workout you do or how intense you should go or if you should just rest for the day.

After 6 months, some of the things I’ve noticed that improve this score for me are:

• Actually working out. My body still wants that stimulus in order to kick into recovery mode.

• Baths. This is excellent because I love a good bath.

• More sleep. To a point, that 8.5 hour mark is really bang on for me and allows for the odd shorter or disrupted night once a week.

The sleep thing has been a big change for me because for the last few years I’ve been an early riser (5-5:30am).

Not because I enjoy punishing myself, but simply because I find that I’m easier for other people to consume after I’ve had 30-60 minutes to myself upon waking. A less grumpy Kyle/Dad/husband makes everyone’s mornings smoother.

But it often meant I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I’d get ~7 hours most nights, but over time that would create just enough sleep debt that if one of the kids got sick kid or I had a late night, it would totally destroy me.

So I started letting myself sleep in a little, 6-6:30am, which often still had me up before the rest of the household.

I started noticing a few things:

• My craving for sugar decreased.

• I procrastinated less before doing my workouts.

• And it was much easier to focus and work on the things I wanted to work on.

I’d tried willpowering myself into not raiding the kid’s lolly stash. I’d changed my workout program about a million times to try to get myself more excited. I obsessed about my work schedule, trying to optimise it in every way because ‘that must be the problem’.

But it wasn’t until I started focusing on the in-between. On recovering from my days of work, exercise and raising small children. On getting just a little more sleep. That suddenly things started falling into place.

And so, I promised that there was a point to it, and it’s this:

Recently I returned to taking on regular coaching clients. In the past when I’ve run group and one-on-one coaching programs I’ve met with the participants weekly, but this time I choose to meet just twice a month.

This was partly to help with scheduling and creating a buffer in my life for family, but was mostly because of this need to recover.

Coaching sessions are like a good workout. You’re potentially being challenged in new ways. You’re uncovering what you really want, important things you may have forgotten in your efforts to keep up with the world.

And that needs space. It needs space for you to absorb, to reflect, to transcend.

The coaching is the stimulus, but the magic happens during the in-between.

Now, as I wrap this up, I have a question: What does recovery look like for you? What are your favourite ways to give your mind or body some space? Or maybe this is something you’d like to work on too.

I’d love our little group to have a chat about it, just drop a comment on this post. Even if it’s just to let me know you read it, it would mean a lot to me to hear from you.

Also, if you’re interested in working with me 1:1, I’ve just opened up a few spots for coaching. Full details are here if that sounds supportive to you.

Chat soon and big hugs!

-Kyle

P.S. I know many of your reading this are trainers, let me know if this article inspires any changes in how you run your own classes/workouts.