Just Getting It In

Yesterday was one of those days where a PR was no where in sight. Not only that, my relative effort and motivation to do anything productive in my workout was fairly non-existent. You see, the day before I spent the better part of the day in my garden trying to make it into some sort of realistically presentable structure. I hadn’t pulled weeds yet this year due to travel and inclement weather, so I vowed that I would weed the entire thing and re-design it, regardless of the weather.

Mother Nature didn’t disappoint. As if on cue, knowing I had something to do outside, she spent the better part of the morning delivering intermittent showers and wind gusts with brief moments of lucidity that gave a faint hope of better things to come. Regardless of whether it was currently raining or not, the ground was completely saturated, which meant it was more like rolling around in a mud pit than anything resembling actual garden work.

All said, I spent 6 hours in a deep squat position, leaning forward and pulling pr pushing at stuff that was ahead of my center of gravity, which made my back completely hate me yesterday. The good news is that the hatred was mostly muscular and not referring down my hamstrings or limiting my ability to move more than the first few hours in the morning. The burn was like I had just done 50 sets of high volume deadlifts with crappy form, which was somewhat rewarding in and of itself.

Since bending forward was not going to result in anything other than an epic fail at life on my part, yesterdays workout deviated from trying to get in some more time with kettlebells to build up my snatch test to somewhat of a more random cluster of things thrown together.

Not only was my back against me, I was tired. Physically I was pretty pooped, but 6 hours in a garden combined with not having any kind of a day off since April will tend to do that to you (not to mention 3 major trips, launching a video product, and training 60 clients hours a week).

The workout was not one of my best, but I hung in there to get some stuff done anyways. I know that every time I do a workout, I wind up leaving feeling better than when I went in. I decided that I could either sandbag the workout and go drown my sorrows in Starbucks, or just do stuff that had no real specific purpose other than to get me moving without taxing my back too much or making me get more exhausted.

I wound up slinging some kettlebells through elastics and hanging them from a bench press bar to simulate a bamboo bar for dynamic stabilization and banged out a few sets. Then I did some chinups, some double kettlebell overhead press, low weight incline dumbbell chest press, hip presses off the bench with just bodyweight, and some core activation stuff.

I’d love to tell you sets and reps, but to be honest I wasn’t counting or even caring how many I was at. I stopped when I was tired. Whether that was at 5 or 15, it didn’t matter. I just moved until I felt like stopping.

I mentioned the concept of not counting reps and simply stopping when tired to Jon Goodman when I was in Toronto last October for the PTDC Becoming the Expert seminar, and he was somewhat befuddled at the simplicity and effectiveness of it. He mentioned in passing that it would probably prevent a lot of injuries and issues with technique if more people did it.

I’ve had a few clients who have come in feeling as beat up as I felt yesterday, and as a result I wind up tailoring their workouts somewhat based on whether they have an actual physical reduction in potential or whether they just have a case of the blahs. If they’re physically under the weather, I drop some weights, reduce the reps, include some other activities that take a bit of thought to get through so they aren’t just physically beating their head against a wall, and just try to get them moving.

If they just want to share a cookie and talk about their feelings, we’ll probably go through some zone 5 metabolic conditioning work to make their left ventricle explode.

I was in the former category, so making it a “go through the motions” kind of workout was all I was going to get. I consider it sort of like doing the laundry. It’s totally not necessary to do it right now or today, but if you don’t, there’s a consequence to that action, being you don’t have any clean clothes that you may want to wear tomorrow and have to roll with your “Frankie Says Relax” t-shirt from junior high you still haven’t thrown out yet.

To your board meeting.

Sure, you may get some good laughs, maybe an errant sideways eye from the girl from accounting, but it probably won’t do you too much good. You just have to get the laundry done.

Cogently, sometimes you just have to get a workout in. Any workout. And in many instances, less is better than none. At the end of my workout, me energy wasn’t any higher, I wasn’t sweating much at all, and I wasn’t feeling that really satisfying pump that meant something was going to happen. But my back felt a lot better. I had the time, I had the facility, I had the clothes at work, I had no excuse. I got in the workout and felt better because of it.

For those days where you’re thinking of just phoning in sick for your workout, you’d probably be better off doing something slightly left of normal and simply moving more than you currently are now. Sitting on the couch is meant for after the workout and earned days off. Even if you aren’t training hard as a mutha or going beast mode or any other superlative you like, just get in there and do SOMETHING. It’s always better than not.

What do you do on “off-days?” (which shouldn’t be confused with “days off”) Drop a comment below and let me know.

PS. For those interested in coming to Boston at the end of July to attend the seminar Tony Gentilcore and I are putting on at Cressey Performance, space is filling up quickly. We’re already halfway to sold out, and the early bird special is only on until July 1st, so get on it now. Plus, there’s a special “Mystery Guest Speaker” who’s going to be hanging out on Friday night and delivering a short presentation to everyone as an added bonus.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BOSTON SEMINAR