When You Shouldn’t Give It Your All {Weekend Recap}

Hello friends!

I don’t know about you guys, but a low-key weekend was much needed for me after my week last week. A couple of things with work and otherwise kind of bogged me down, and I totally needed a few days to mentally decompress a bit.

Luckily, my hubby and I had only one thing on the agenda for the weekend: getting our carpets cleaned, because every time I did a pushup in recent months, I’d get a whiff of a certain someone who loves to snooze on my living room floor…

While we waited for our carpets to dry, we killed time at the Del Mar dog beach. It was a beautiful day for a long walk there! There are certainly worse places to waste time. 🙂

My weekend also included an at-home movie night, a long family walk along the coast Sunday morning, heading back to the beach that afternoon to relax and read for a few hours, and my first mountain biking session since my foot injury diagnosis.

I’ve only been doing strength training, yoga, walking my pup, and non-plymetric movement since I’m trying to heal my tiny broken foot bones, and I’ve been really craving a sweaty cardio session. What can I say, I’m a sweat junkie and I love how it feels to have my endorphins pumping after some great cardio! Strength training just doesn’t give me quite the same strong mood-boosting effect.

It felt wonderful to get my heart rate up pushing myself up the hilly terrain, but since I’m trying to be really conscious of how my injury and body in general feels, we only went riding for just about 45 minutes. I was reminded of a conversation that my mom and I recently had about both of us being tough in a way that can actually be detrimental.

We’re always told to “give it your all” and “go big or go home.” In every Jillian Michaels DVD that I own  – and I have quite the collection – she mentions not giving up on the workout and pushing through the pain. I’m definitely a ‘no excuses’ type of person that tends to agree with her mentality of working through the challenge, but what I’ve realized is that sometimes, putting 100% effort into physical challenges is just not the healthiest thing to do.

When it comes to the injuries that I’ve had, I think that they’ve partly been a result of giving it my all and mentally pushing through while my body really was sending subtle signals to slow it down. The competitor and tough chick in me wants to fight through whatever physical challenge I’m doing – whether that means a fitness challenge at my gym, an extreme hike, or a mountain biking excursion with A.

I’m all about living with fire and being passionate in life, and I think that this “all in” mentality in general has helped me to be successful in life, but I think the tricky part is recognizing when giving it my all may actually hurt me. Pushing through to accomplish something in health and fitness is great, but there are also times when it’s okay to go a bit easy – like when you’re about to tear a muscle or cause a stress fracture. Sometimes distinguishing between temporary pain and “real” pain is no easy feat.

So, this injury is forcing me to work on that and to remember to listen to my body. Sometimes taking it easy is the healthy answer. My mountain biking workout last weekend was a good reminder that I don’t always need to go balls-to-the-wall to have fun, get a good workout in and get those endorphins pumping!

Tell me.. What’s the best cardio workout you’ve done lately? Do you consider yourself good at listening to your body?