At the beginning of our first Covid-19 lockdown, I became quite inactive and sedentary compared to my regular lifestyle. This eased a little as restrictions did, but then became particularly noticeable during the second lockdown – it’s amazing how you can feel when you haven’t been as active as usual! I decided that I needed to get back to my usual activity levels and utilise my 1-hour of ‘out of the house’ exercise each day (thankfully it’s now 2-hours!) My sister joined me on this quest, although our reasons for being active are very different – I’m being active for general health reasons, whereas she is being active to improve her athleticism and lower her injury risk for Basketball related goals. However, we both utilised outdoor running/walking and strength training in our small home gym.
After a week, we both started to feel the same soreness and fatigue. The soreness was particularly bad in our calves and glutes. In general, we felt stiff, we weren’t able to move around as freely and we felt more fatigue than normal.
Why? Where did this soreness and fatigue come from?
Poor load management, in other words we had done too much exercise too quickly compared to what our bodies we able to deal with. We all have the best intentions when it comes to exercise, but if we don’t manage our workload correctly, there can be consequences. These consequences can potentially undo much of the positive steps we have taken by being active. Managing our load is a crucial component to maximising the health benefits of exercise and increasing our chances of achieving our goals!
Today’s post looks at load management, starting our journey with why it is important before looking at how we can monitor our load and effective strategies we can all implement to effectively manage our work load and aid in recovery.
This is a very informative blog post. I’ve been using some of these methods for a while but it’s nice to have an in depth explanation of how and why they’re so useful.