Here’s what all fitness buffs need to know
about giving their bodies a break.
By ALISA BAUMAN
During a cross-country skiing race in March
of 2003, Steve Waitt took a major tumble, badly
injuring his shoulder. He finished the event anyway, skiing the final eight miles in enormous
pain. A few days later he began to suffer
stomach problems.
A seasoned athlete, Waitt, then 48,
wasn’t surprised. He knew that extreme
exertion and trauma could impact immunity. He’d been training hard for months
and figured his fall and final push had put
him over.
What Waitt wasn’t prepared for was a double wham-my: What seemed like a stomach bug soon developed into
a serious digestive disorder that stopped him in his tracks,
causing the already-lean athlete to begin losing weight
precipitously. Alarmed, he sought help from a series of
doctors and was eventually diagnosed with
an autoimmune disease, which devastated the health-conscious Waitt. “I’ve
always been very careful about tracking
and maintaining my health,” he explains.
“But it seemed like my body got pushed
past some limit and went sort of haywire.”
As a result of injury and illness,
Waitt was forced to seriously scale back his
training activities. He took it easy for a few
months, forgoing his regular training regimen of
running and roller-skiing in favor of walking and
long, easy road cycling. He also included some
strength and flexibility work.
By late fall, with his health improving, Waitt
resumed serious training, faced with what he
thought could be the long and frustrating task
of rebuilding his fitness. Early snow in Minnesota
allowed him to hit the trails in November. The
first time he stepped into his skis, he didn’t know
what to expect.
Waitt was surprised and delighted to discover that
he felt better than ever. “I had this new level of endurance,” says Waitt. “I didn’t tire as easily, and I was
amazed at how strong and full of energy I felt.”
According to Waitt, it seemed that his body had
just been waiting for time off in order to do some
much-needed repair work. Apparently, it made use
of the opportunity to do upgrades. “I’m finding now
that I’m able to ski faster with less effort,” says
Waitt. “Laying off and resting after so many years
of hard training seems to have really paid off.”
Waitt’s story is no anomaly, according to
many expert trainers. In order to get stronger,
faster and more powerful, they explain, some-
times rather than bearing down, an athlete
needs to lighten up.
Closed for Repairs
Clearly, your body requires a certain amount of stressful stimulus to grow stronger. In fact, that damage-recovery cycle is the whole basis of fitness training:
You break your body down, and it responds by
building itself back up better than before.
But if you’ve been putting your
body through its paces without opportunity for full recovery, or if you’ve been
under additional stresses (physical, mental
or emotional), you may not be giving your
body a chance to restore itself. To do so, you
may need to change your routine, pare down
your training load or, in some cases, walk
away from training altogether — at least for a
little while.
“You can only make fitness gains when your
body has time to recover from the training loads you
put it under,” asserts Chris Carmichael, founder of
Carmichael Training Systems in Colorado Springs, Colo.,
and coach of seven-time Tour de France champion
Lance Armstrong. That means the harder you push,
the more carefully you must observe the low points
of your periodization schedule.
For an elite athlete like Armstrong, Carmichael
not only inserts rest days into a training schedule, he
also prescribes rest weeks, even months. After every
three days of hard training, he instructs all his elite
athletes to take a 24- to 48-hour break. After ➺
