My Journey With Health And Fitness – Listening To My Body

Yesterday would have been my brother’s 59th birthday. My sister and I decided we wanted to do something fun to celebrate him. We started out at a casino (he loved going to the casino) where we came out pretty good. We then got together was a large group of friends to enjoy lunch and a few toasts at his favourite pub. It was really just a lovely day.

I had skipped the fitness class yesterday morning because we wanted the day to just be about our brother. I didn’t feel bad about doing this as I knew I would just miss one class this week. As such I was up at the normal 3:30am time and off for my 5km walk by 4:15am. Tuesday is always a strength and mobility class so I try to push myself a bit and use weights that are on the heavier side. Sometimes it takes talking myself into using weights that I’m not sure I can handle but quite frankly I usually can.

Today we started out doing barbell front squats. To do this I cross my arms with my elbows parallel with the floor, rest the barbell basically across my collar bones and do a squat. While normally I would load the bar up with 10lb plates today I decided to grab the 15lb plates instead. Currently I am really focusing on pushing through equally on both legs so that distracted me from the thought that with the bar I was squatting with 65lbs.

The next exercises was good mornings (I have no idea why it has this name) which is where you place a heavy weight just below the nape of your neck and you bend until your chest is parallel to the floor. Again I went heavy with a 25lb weight. To complete this set we finished with single leg glute bridges with the twist that the heel of the leg doing the bridge was elevated on a bench.

I got through the first round ok but then I went to do the second round of good mornings I felt something twinge near my hip. As I continued on I realized it was more like I had pulled something in my groin. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t debilitating just painful enough to let me know something was wrong. I did finish not just this set but 2 other sets of exercises as I knew nothing in these other sets would impact my groin. Oh, and then I walked the 5km home.

But here’s the thing, I also realized on my walk home that my body was saying hey, something hurts here, maybe pull back a bit. I opted to stop my day at 3 hours of exercise including 10km of walking. That’s a lot of exercise already done and more than most people do in a day. Instead I listened to my body and am giving it break for the rest of the day.

I want to be clear, there is a big difference between discomfort and pain. Yes, somedays my body is screaming because I have worked it hard but that just makes me stronger. However, when there is pain in a joint (like my knee or ankle) or pain in an area you haven’t been working on then that is an indication that something is not quite right.

Will I feel bad that I didn’t burn 3,000 calories today? Probably. Will I feel better if tomorrow I don’t have any pain? Abosolutely.