Resting

Is it weird that I struggle with taking rest days?  Do "normal" people not look forward to sleeping in later, and giving their body a break from hard physical work?

 

Guys - every week I struggle so hard to force myself to take my rest day.  With my current muscle group split, I rest on Thursdays and Sundays.  Every Wednesday evening (cough*right now*cough), I start turning reasons around in my mind why I should get up and workout in the morning.

 

Who does that?!?

 

My alarm goes off at 4:30 AM on Mon, Tues, Weds, and Fri.  It goes off at 5:50 AM on Saturdays.  What's wrong with me, that I don't want to sleep until 6 AM on Thursday?

 

I've seen a ton of progress with my body in the last few months, and I know that's a big driving force with my motivation right now.  I've also started taking a pre-workout, which makes my workouts much "easier," if you will, to do.

 

Rest days are imperative for a healthy lifestyle, though.  Not only do they allow your physical body to rest and recover, they also prevent burnout. 

 

Things I try to focus on on rest days are eating the right, healthful foods, getting enough sleep, taking care of any food prep I need to take care of for the rest of the week, and thinking about how awesome that shoulder workout is going to feel on Friday morning! :)

 

 

What about you?  Do you struggle with rest days, or live for them?

 

What's your workout routine look like?

 

Am I totally weird?

Information Overload

When I get "into" something, I like to read about it and research it.  That's where I'm at right now with fat loss/lean muscle gain.

 

I've been researching IIFYM, clean eating, how to most effectively gain muscle, how to burn fat, etc.  I think I'm in a state of information overload right now.  Just for fun, here are a few sentences that I've read in the past few days that stand out to me:

 

 

 

Remember, your body is really smart and it wont burn muscle unless you do something really stupid like running 3000 miles or doing a drastic fad diet.

Source

 

Drawbacks of Cardio for Muscle Building

• Burns calories that could be used for muscle growth
• “Over-training”

Source

 

Cardio is good for your heart, your mental outlook and controlling your weight, but it can interfere with muscle growth if you're burning more calories that you're taking in.

Source

 

4. Do INTENSE Cardiovascular Workouts 3-4 Times A Week.

Source

 

Make sure that you are eating enough calories to enable you to make those improvements and show up better next time you step on stage. Though you might put on a little (note I said a little) body fat, the body fat will come off once you diet down for your next show.

Source

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, there's a plethora of information out there on the lovely interwebs to do one of two things:  either motivate, educate, and encourage me to be better, or confuse the living heck out of me.

 

Lately, it's doing the latter.

 

I have enough common sense, and have my own opinions about eating.  From all the reading ahd research I've been doing over the last few months, I think I'm going to work on meeting my macros from iifym with as much clean and healthy food as possible, and making sure I'm consuming enough of that food to sustain healthy muscle growth. (In the past, I haven't eaten nearly enough calories in a day as I should have been eating.  That's a whole other blog post for another day.)  I'm going to lift heavy, and cut cardio down to 4 days a week (right now, I do 6).  I'm going to continue to drink my gallon of water a day, and give a better effort to not letting it all go to crap on the weekends, which I tend to do.

 

I feel like if I start doing all that stuff, I'm going to have the muscle tone I want and lose enough of the fat to let that tone show through by the time summer 2014 arrives!

 

What about you?  Do you lift heavy?

 

What kind of split do you do?

I'm currently doing a 5-day split.

 

How much cardio do you do each week?