HOW TO GET BACK INTO EXERCISE AFTER A LAPSE
April 18, 2013
A good reminder for all of us: Honor your entry ramp and slow and steady is best. Enjoy this article from the WSJ.
Pregnancy, injury, sickness or a hectic month at work can cause lapses in workout routines. Motivation and patience are key to getting back on track in a safe and healthy way. “When unavoidable situations arise, realize they are just short-term holdups to your exercise program, not permanent derailments,” says Barbara Bushman, a professor at Missouri State University’s Department of Kinesiology. “Have a return plan in action.”
Dr. Bushman wrote a chapter called “Dealing with Setbacks” for the American College of Sports Medicine’s “Complete Guide to Fitness and Health.” She says motivation is half the battle. “Mentally identify what you want to accomplish,” she says. “I encourage people to set both short-term as well as long term goals.”
Jim Pivarnik, a professor of kinesiology at Michigan State, says setting a comeback schedule helps ease back into a workout routine safely. “A schedule helps monitor your progress and ensures that you don’t go back too fast and crash in the process,” he says.
Pain and undue fatigue are often signs that a person is doing too much too soon, says Dr. Pivarnik. Muscle soreness, on the other hand, isn’t always a sign to take a day off. “Be mindful of it and if the soreness doesn’t go away in a day or two, then take time off,” he says.
He says how quickly you ease back into a routine largely depends on the intensity of what you had been doing. “If you were doing a more passive version of yoga, it would not take as long to get back into that as if you were doing a more active, cardio-intense yoga,” he says. “I often tell runners who are getting back into a routine to increase their mileage no more than 10% per week.”
—Jen Murphy
