Recover

I've mentioned in the past that it is not exercise, but your recovery from exercise, that brings improvement in your fitness.  You can train like a man or woman possessed, but if you don't give your body a chance to repair the damage that the training has done, your athletic performances will get worse, not better.  This is what we call "overtraining."

One of the many interesting ideas I've learned from reading Ron Lugbill's blog is to count recovery sessions among your workouts for the week--in other words, if you do three recovery sessions and nine other kinds of workouts in a week, you're allowed to say you did twelve workouts that week.  A recovery "session" consists of activities intended to help your body recover, such as a hot shower or soak in a hot tub followed by some relaxed, deliberate stretching.  Sounds like the kind of workout I can look forward to.  And it just so happens I have a hot tub at my house!  A few years ago a friend of Martha's had one he didn't want, and he told Martha that if she would arrange to move the thing, it was all hers.  Score!  And so since I read Lugbill's advice a couple of weeks ago, I've tried to get in several hot tub and stretching "workouts" each week.

And I could sure use some recovery right now.  My arms did indeed get sore after I introduced some pullups into my routine on Tuesday, and it hasn't run its course yet.  I went easy on the pullups when I did my two sets of the February strength routine this morning.

After the strength work I got in the boat and did five sets of the resistance paddling that I started doing Sunday--that is, I butted my boat up against the marina and tried to "push" it with ten strokes.  Then I continued with steady paddling for a 60-minute session.

The weather conditions were not what I would call hostile, but they sure weren't pleasant, either.  It was overcast and in the mid 40s at the time I was on the water, and the wind was screaming out of the north.  I was just glad not to be having the sort of weather the northeast U.S. is having today.