How Well Do You Recover?

It’s quite common to see people going to the gym to get stronger or running outside to improve their cardiovascular system (or perhaps they just have to imagination for what to do with extra time on their hands). However, does working out really improve your fitness level or overall health? By itself, no. In fact, exercise just makes you weaker and more tired (feeling motivated yet?). In fact, without proper recovery, exercise can actually reduce your level of health and fitness.

Now before you go cancel your gym membership, please understand that I am not saying working out has no value. That isn’t the case at all. But as a standalone event, exercise has little to no positive effect. Let me give you an example: If you get in a really solid, intense workout and then spend the rest of the day eating junk food, pounding energy drinks instead of water and staying up all night with no sleep, there’s a good chance that your workout will be useless at best. Or, you may end up like a very good friend of mine who tried that very post-workout cocktail and found himself hospitalized for several days with rhabdomyolysis.  

You see, exercise is simply a trigger. It’s how you respond to the training – with rest, recovery, proper nutrition and hydration or a lack thereof – that is the primary determining factor in the level of benefit you’ll receive from the time in the gym. After all, it just makes sense that how you spend the other 23 hours of the day overshadows the impact of the 60 minutes spent exercising.

The trials of life are a lot like this. We often can’t control the adversity we face in life, but we can control how we respond to those times of testing. It’s how we choose to “recover” from those events that determines whether we will benefit from going through it. We can observe two people facing similar adversity and one may come out a stronger and a better individual on the other side, while the other never seems to bounce back, doesn’t recover and is weaker and more fragile after the fact. Same trigger, different response.

Whether it’s at the gym or simply in life, at the end of the testing, the growth is just beginning. It’s not just what happens, it’s what you make of it that really matters.