My Journey With Health And Fitness – Taking Some Recovery Time

I have to say I am looking forward to dressing for winter. Last year I spent most of the winter months simply wearing sweat pants because that was all I had that fit comfortably. Now I am back into wearing most of my jeans (need a couple more pounds to be in the skinny jeans). You need to understand I have many pairs of jeans in different colours and styles but the one thing they have in common is they are all size 6. Well, apparently I am back to being a size 6 because most of my jeans fit. This means I can dress a little better this year.

I had a really terrible sleep last night. I was quite cold when I went to bed and very unlike me I huddled for hours under the duvet. When I checked my sleep score this morning it was pretty bad and I was surprised that hardly any of my sleep time had my heart rate below my resting heart rate which is also unusual. I woke up this morning with a massive headache and I was exhausted.

Now I don’t normally get headaches. Seriously, it happens maybe once every 2 or 3 years. Of course when I do get them they are quite debilitating and this morning’s was no different. I popped a couple extra strength ibuprofen but after 45 minutes there was no change. It was at that point that I went online and canceled my Power Hour class and crawled back into bed for a few hours.

My Fitbit has been screaming at me lately that I need some recovery time and I guess that is what I needed this morning. By time I got up again the headache was reduced to a dull throb which was tolerable. Not wanting to lose momentum with my training I decided maybe a brief walk would be a good idea. While it was chilly out the sun was shining and after about 1/2 hour I realized the headache was completely gone and so I completed a 90 minute walk. By time I got home I felt so much better.

But it was ok that I recognized that I needed a bit of extra time for my body to recover today. I have been hitting the workouts pretty hard since I got back from Mexico and it was time to step back a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I will still probably burn 1,000+ calories doing exercise today it will just be in a gentler fashion than starting my day with an intense workout.

Bottom line is once again I was listening to my body and doing what was best to let me recover a bit so that I can keep going.