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Monday, August 6, 2012

Conditioning Your Body

There's a fine point to conditioning your body and damaging your body.  Each person has their own limit to what they can do at a certain point.  When we go past that point, our body can choose to adapt and grow stronger (conditioning) or it can choose to not adapt and end up destroying itself.  It's important to know your body well enough and know where you are at in order to condition yourself.  Before every season, football players have a conditioning session in which they get pushed to grow.  Although the sessions are meant to jump start the growth of the individual, assisting in making the individual stronger, sometimes, it can be too much and injuries are likely to take place.  The grey area between our limits and our destruction is where our bodies find ways to adapt.  When we barely go beyond our limits, our body will slowly adapt, but the adaptation will take long due to the small amount we are going beyond the limit.  However, going close to destroying yourself isn't a fun place to be.  When training, it's important to know that it isn't just one day that makes you into who you are.  In fact, your life as a whole pushes you towards the destruction point while each day you rest helps lower the level you are currently at.  If you continuously push, you'll end up at that point, and from there on, it's downhill and you would need a lot of recovery time in order to get to where you need to be.

When you condition your body, you push the limits, forcing the body to adapt.  Given enough time, the body will adapt and a new limit would be made, pushing the 'destruction zone' further away.  With a good and healthy balance and force, one could improve themselves to become stronger.  In the same way, when we work, we adapt to what we do.  When we go beyond what we can handle, we might be able to finish our objective, but we would go into a 'burnout' stage where we wouldn't be able to handle simple tasks.  Balance is the key to conditioning your body, and the more you know yourself, the better you can be at balancing the amount of work you put upon yourself.

Today, I went for a run, running 7 miles in 52:53, an average of 7:33.  I wasn't working too hard, but because of my current body condition, my nice and easy time has slightly improved.  After eating a good dinner, I proceeded to go to the gym and work out.  I did 22 pull ups, 55 push ups, cycled for an hour (17.4 miles) and did 220 single leg calf raises per calf, and due to how late it was, I had to leave.  Because of all the hard work that I have been doing almost every day, I've been able to push into the grey zone without going into the destruction zone.  Working towards a goal means conditioning your body to be able to achieve that goal.  I can't wait to condition my body to get there.

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