Hey friends,
It’s Tom here, how are things with you lately?
Those of you who have read my previous posts (bold of me to assume I have repeat readership, I know) will know that I love to use fitness analogies to share life lessons. Well, staying on brand, here we go again – with a fresh blog all around the topic of growth.
Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!
I was recently discussing the topic of free time with some of my good friends. I, for one, am rubbish with my use of free time, mainly because I always feel that I have to be ‘productive’.
It is sad really. I often look forward to my evening off and search for a film or series to enjoy. Then a little voice whispers in my ear, ‘Tom, come on, is this a productive use of your time? Does spending the next two hours consuming this content take you closer to your goals?’. The little voice is internal by the way, it is not a strange person judging me whilst I watch films.
The one caveat to this is doing nothing with other people, for some reason I can justify this internally however, that is a discussion for another time…
Anyway, this is an unhealthy way of doing things. I am always going on about pushing yourself, productivity and chasing your goals, and all that good stuff. However, we can’t just keep pushing and pushing until we reach breaking point – something has got to change.
Let’s turn to my helpful analogy to explain. Some of us decide that we want to put on muscle mass, to feel more capable, more comfortable in our own skin. To achieve this, we head to the gym and pump some good old iron.
Now, let me ask you, in the pursuit of meaty arms do we bicep curl for 12 hours a day? No. Whilst training for a marathon do we run 12 hours a day? No. It is simple not a sustainable way of doing things.
When you pick up the bar and smash out a set of 10 bicep curls close to failure, you are tearing your muscle fibres. Within 48 hours, those torn muscle fibres repair themselves bigger and stronger to deal with new stimulus you have presented them with. This repair and growth process happens when we are not in the gym, it happens when we are resting.
Have you ever heard of overtraining? Overtraining is when you push your body too far without allowing it the necessary recovery time. Without going into the complicated physiology of overtraining, the simple takeaway is that overtraining is counterproductive to training efficiency; it prevents proper recovery, disrupts hormone balance, increases injury risk, and prolongs recovery time.
In saying all of this, what’s the key lesson that we can all takeaway here?
Growth occurs in rest.
You would not expect your body to work 12 hours a day, so why should you expect your brain to? Take the time to switch off and recover, you’d be surprised at just how much you need it. A little break can make the world of difference to our mindset on all of the twists and turns that life has in store for us.
Over to you, do you take the necessary time needed to recover? What do you do to switch off? And do you have someone whispering in your ear whenever you open Netflix?
That’s it for now, wishing you all the best.
See you in the next one!
Tom
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