You spent the last few weeks giving 110% to your fat loss plan to lose weight. You endured the sickening pain of the exercises and post-workout muscle soreness. You stuck to your diet religiously and changed your lifestyle in your dedicated attempt to lose weight. But one fine day, illness or injury strikes. You are out of action for a few days, sometimes weeks. All that time off causes your muscles to go flat and the lack of physical activity makes you grow fat all over again. All that exercising to reduce your tummy seem to have gone to waste.
This is very demoralizing. I know because I have recently gone through that. I was hit by a case of food poisoning two weeks ago that made me lose 4 lbs of muscle and severely weakened my body.
Last week when I returned to the gym, I looked like a shadow of my old self. I regretted wearing my usual tank top to the gym as my once muscular arms looked like spaghetti to me. Needless to say, my strength plummeted and I felt tired easily. Looking at how weak I've become, the thought of giving up training or procrastinate for another few months was very tempting indeed.
If you're ever feeling the same way and think of giving up after being struck by injuries or illness, here are some ways to motivate yourself back to training and reignite your fat burning furnace:
1. Reaffirm your goals. What are you training for?
Think about your main motivation for training in the first place. What is your main driving force and objective? Did you start training to lose weight so you can feel more confident about yourself, to lose beer belly, be healthier or to look better? Ask yourself how important are those objectives to you. Whatever reason it is that motivated you to start exercising, use that same driving force to spur you to continue.
2. Muscle memory
Here's another big motivating factor to come back to training. If you are concerned about having to start from the beginning and spend the same amount of time building up your fitness or muscles again, here's where muscle memory comes in. Those who have been training for awhile and suddenly undergo a layoff will find it easier to re-develop the muscle mass again. Why is that? Because our bodies have already learnt how to effectively execute the exercises and know how we will respond to the resistance training. In short, we no longer need to go through the same learning curve as we did when we first started out and this makes getting back to your former condition a lot easier.
From my past experience, depending on the severity of my illness, I usually take no more than three to four weeks to come back to 100%.
3. Are you a quitter?
You have worked so hard to get where you were before. Ask yourself, are you going to waste all that effort just to give up now? Like they always say, "What does not kill me makes me stronger". You have a goal to achieve. If you resume your exercise routine, you will eventually see that tummy disappear. If you give up now, you will never realize your goal.
4. Just do it!
Lao Zi once said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Take baby steps to slowly get yourself back into gear. On days where I don't feel like working out (because of pure laziness and nothing else), I would just tell myself to just put on my exercise attire and see how I go. After that, I would tell myself to fix my post workout protein and again, see how I feel. Then I'll go ahead and fix my pre-workout coffee. Usually after that, I would just go ahead with my workout even if it means spending just 30 minutes working out because I'm already all packed up and ready to go.
Once you feel that you ready to lace up your training shoes again, below are some tips that will help ease you back into your usual training routine again.
1. Train at home first
If you have always trained at the gym and are somewhat self-conscious about your appearance at the gym, you might want to start off with some basic calisthenics at home first just to build back the basic fitness. To return to the gym with people making comments about how weak or fat you've become can be very demoralizing. So take a week or so to build back your fitness at home first so you won't appear as weak as you would if you had returned to the gym immediately after your layoff.
2. Take supplements to boost recovery
There are many performance enhancing supplements (Read: NOT steriods) that will help speed up your recovery process. One supplement that I constantly rely on is creatine.
A product of the liver, creatine is substance that is involved in the producing energy in our bodies. Creatine supplementation is very common among athletes as it has been proven to increase muscle strength, endurance, energy and reduce fatigue.
3. Take it easy
You have just recovered from your injury and illness, don't expect to come back and train to failure immediately. Especially if you just recovered from an injury, you should perform your repetitions in a more slow and deliberate manner, focusing on form rather than explosiveness. As a general rule, train 50% intensity first (half of your usual poundage or half your usual repetition) and as the weeks go by, gradually increase to 100%.
4. The exercises that really matter
Like I've mentioned in previous articles, the quickest way to lose weight and to strengthen your body quickly is to concentrate on big lifts and compound exercises such as dead lifts, squats, bench press and rows. These are the exercises that truly matter when it comes to increasing your overall metabolic rate, increasing your growth hormone and burning calories to help you lose beer belly.
Illness and injury can strike any one of us at any time even when we take very good care of ourselves. This is the painful reality of training and maintaining fitness. What takes us months to build can be lost in a matter of days. But this doesn't mean we should give up or even not start at all. The long-term benefits of exercising to lose weight and improving overall fitness far exceed any temporary setback you face.
When you are forced to lay off from training due to illness or injury, your priority should be recovery. Don't be demoralized by how much your fitness has deteriorated or how much weight you've gained during the layoff. Remember the points I've mentioned in this article, especially muscle memory, and you will be back on 100% before you know it. I wish you all the best and remember, just do it!
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