By Femi Paseda
You probably must have heard a lot of statements like “you have to work hard to lose as much weight as you want, there is no pain without gain, while you’re sleeping, others are exercising, if it’s easy, you’re not growing, it’s a male-dominated world, you have to earn your place.”
We know you’ve heard a lot of these statements as a woman, but the fact is that this mindset leaves us with the wrong impression based on our work and, of course, exercise. However, you need to understand that gaining all the benefits that come from exercising is not just about pushing through pain barriers. It’s about consistently engaging in routines that make us feel good. It is about practising the things we love doing and nothing else.
Gaining the highest level of health and fitness as a woman comes from constantly moving your body and keeping at it rather than pushing yourself too hard. When you push yourself excessively, you either get sick or injured and then you cannot exercise at this point.
If you’re exercising, sweating, and enjoying it, then you have the capacity to keep at it and not feel like you’re overdoing it. The more you love it, the more you can push yourself to do more, and the more love you have for it, the faster you recover. Now recovery time does not mean you have to sit back and do nothing; you can passively recover by taking on moderate and low-intensity workouts which relax you and allow blood passage throughout your body.
Recovery is a necessity if you want your body to recover, especially as a woman. If you keep pushing and pushing yourself every day, either at home or at the gym, without the slightest recovery time, you are eventually going to crash and get fatigued. So, as much as you would like to push yourself till you achieve the fitness levels you are looking for, you need to always take time out to recover.
You Only Get Stronger When You Recover
While you might want to lose weight and become fitter, you only get better when you take out time to recover. When you workout, you tear your muscles so they can grow stronger. However, for the right results., you need to give your muscles enough time to rebuild and repair; else, you’re going to get fatigued.
Aside from relaxing from our exercise routines, we also need to rest from all the stress we go through each day. Our environment is becoming a lot more stressful than it has ever been, and a lot of us are fatigued and tired because we feel the need to push through the stress. However, this stress makes us lack a lot of motivation to push forward, and this leaves us with the need to rest. This calms the body down and improves our capacity to exercise whenever we want to. So, if you have been depriving yourself of sleep, now is the right time to start resting. You can workout and still thrive when you take time to rest because relaxation and rest is not a luxury; it is a necessity.
