So you’ve started your challenge and have been doing so for a few days. Are you starting to feel tired of your challenge, or maybe you think it is too monotonous? That can easily happen, and it probably happens to most of us eventually. Have you tried to vary the difficulty of your challenge?
Why you quickly get tired after you started your challenge
This can be in part explained that we tend to underestimate the difficulty of a challenge before you actually get into it. But that doesn’t explain everything. We are able to follow up for a few days, so why can’t we continue at the same rhythm?
The answer is, the body and the mind simply get tired, and we need to regularly recover from our efforts. Even professional athletes need some time to recover. They train most of the days of the week, but only a few of those days will they actually push themselves. What do they do during the rest of the days you ask? They take it easy, allowing their body to recover from the previous day. For those running, you may have heard of the term “recovery run”. A recovery run is a day following intense training you are going to still go running but at a slow pace and a short distance.
And here is an important concept: allow your body and mind to recover by making your challenge easy every other day. This has the advantage of allowing to have better performance on the intense days, and to break the monotonuous cycle.
A typical training plan
Here is a typical running training program. You can use it as an inspiration to make out your own plan:
– Monday: easy run
– Tuesday: easy run
– Wednesday: speed run
– Thursday: easy run
– Friday: acceleration run
– Saturday: easy run
– Sunday: Long run
Expect to be disturbed
Another important variable we often forget is… life. Yes, life. Have you got any day that has gone exactly according to plan ever? I know its rarely the case for me. And to be honest, I kind of like this unexpectedness in life, but we certainly need to learn to deal with it.
And here varying the difficulty is crucial. We have our plan, but it never goes as we expect. So as you get those variables in your life, adjust your challenge according to it. Someday you will be tired after a hard day of work and will reduce your challenge to the minimum to be satisfied. Some days you will feel better and refreshed or will get more free time and will be able to push a bit more for longer.
No one can decide for yourself, you have to learn to listen to your mind and body. But given the time, you will become more comfortable and more efficient in what you challenge yourself of doing. Vary the difficulty to learn how your body and mind reacts to it.
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