Days 12 & 13 of My 21 Day Reset
When Your Body Says Enough
One of the commitments I made when I started sharing this 21 Day Reset was that I would share the truth. The good days, the breakthroughs, and the days when things don’t go according to plan.
Well, after a productive 11 day tun, I hit a wall. Apparently, 11th straight days of strength training at a calorie deficit can have consequences in addition to benefits.
For the last day and a half, I have felt unusually lethargic. My knees have been achy for absolutely no apparent reason (different than the acute pain as a rest from my run last week that I had fixed), and my body has basically been telling me that it doesn’t want another workout right now.
My first instinct, of course, was to push through it so I strength trained Thursday morning and that made me feel worse. Bad idea!
I spoke with a friend who has a lot of experience with overtraining and then with my health advisor. Both essentially told me the same thing: REST and EAT.
I’ve been training hard while maintaining a calorie deficit during my Reset, and apparently there comes a point where the body simply doesn’t have enough fuel to keep doing everything you’re asking it to do. I was advised to take a couple of full days off from training and intentionally add healthy complex carbohydrates back into my diet to help replenish my body’s energy stores.
My health advisor also introduced me to something I had never heard of before called Kidney Jing.
This is a concept from Traditional Chinese Medicine, not a suggestion that there is something wrong with my actual kidneys. Jing is thought of as the body’s deeper reserve of energy and recovery. In that tradition, feeling depleted and experiencing achy or cold knees can be signs that you’ve pushed those reserves too hard.
Whether you subscribe to Chinese medicine or Western medicine, the message my body is giving me seems pretty clear: I need recovery.
So Day 12 (yesterday) & 13 (today) of my Reset will be a little different. No gym. No pushing through. Carbs!
We shall see how my body responds. Fortunately, tomorrow it’s Sunday, but I wanna be back at it by Monday.
