Over-Exercising, the devil in the wings

   Let me describe a scenario. You've made the decision, your resolve is set in stone. Everyday you start going to the gym. Maybe you went two or three times a week before this, or maybe you never went at all. But you're a beast now! You are going to two group classes in a row 5 days a week, or slamming that elliptical for an hour every day then doing enough abs to make Spanx a thing of the past. Who knows what your goal is. Lose 20 lbs in a month, finally get rid of that jiggly spot, regardless of the dream, with the amount of cardio and HIIT you've been putting in, you should be a stick in no time. Then you get on the scale and it hasn't moved. So you start eating only cabbage, or cut out all sugar and gluten. Problem solved. A week later, you step on the scale expecting big things, and it still hasn't freaking budged! One last balls to the wall attempt has you hitting those HIIT classes like never before, drinking those meal replacement shakes twice a day, and making that elliptical scream! Six days in a row! On the seventh day, you crawl out of bed, nursing a swollen joint, starving yet cringing at the thought of your two egg whites and protein shake breakfast because you could kill a bakers dozen of doughnuts in one breath right now. You slowly crawl to the bathroom, place one toe on the scale to zero it out, then with a deep breath, step on. One. Pound. Up. You swear at life, decide you have a thyroid issue, and that you may as well demolish the bagels and cream cheese in the back of the fridge because you've been dreaming about it for three weeks and what does it matter now anyways.
   What really happened? Odds are you don't have a thyroid issue, but most of us have hypothesized that at one point or another.
   1) The scale didn't move because you are retaining water. When you exercise your muscles, you create micro-tears that heal to build stronger, larger muscles. These tears also create swelling and water retention during the healing process in the same way an injury swells on the outside.
  2) The scale only relays your relationship with gravity, it doesn't describe your physical make-up. Some scales do state your BMI, but that's a useless number. What you may be missing is your body fat percentage. Your body fat percentage is taken using measurements of specific areas of your body and tells you how much of your body is made up of fat as opposed to muscle. You can be the same weight as you were when you started, but have lost inches in body fat and replaced it with lean muscle mass.
   3) Poor nutrition. The human body is a machine. It will do what it has to do to keep itself working. If you don't provide the fuel, either through cutting too many calories or withholding macro-nutrients, it will begin storing what it can and shutting down what it needs to to survive. In fact, if you cut out more than 500 calories a day from food and burn more than 500 calories in exercise at the same time, your body will enter starvation mode and begin storing fat and burning muscle.


   Combine all those with over-exercising and you have a snowball effect. Over-exercising is what happens when you don't give your body a chance to heal. It is a sneaky fiend and happens to the best of us. The most common indicators of over-exercising are fatigue during the day, decline in performance, getting sick more often (unless you have small children, which are mobile germ machines), and a general feeling of yuckiness (malaise).
   It seems frustrating, because you read/see/hear about people in the gym constantly, twice a day, and damn do they look amazing! So why can't you? Hell, you even see meme's spouting how  the dedicated and those truly determined to achieve put forth the effort to get in that damn gym every day. So why not you? The truth is, those people didn't start off in the gym every day, or if they did, they were supervised, advised, and had a plan of attack. They balanced cardio, resistance training, and flexibility training with proper nutrition and they listened when their body spoke. I've had days when I stopped five minutes into a workout because my body was just "done". When that happens, rest. Take a few days and recover. If you need guidance, contact a personal trainer, often times we can schedule one or two sessions just to help you work a plan of attack (we do more than yell at people, I swear!).
    Work smarter, not harder, my friends, and thrive!