Muscle growth... or dink shrink?
Your body develops a tolerance for exercise and muscle growth, something I am all too familiar with. During the fall/winter/spring seasons I usually go to the gym, play a variety of sports, and eat somewhat healthier. However, in the summer I go to work in remote locations where the only thing I can do is hike and eat bacon—luckily I am in love with both of those things, and this does not bother me. However, when I return in the fall and go to the gym for the first time, I always try and pick up where I left off in the spring. It never works out well.
If you are in the gym during any of my ‘first-day-back’ sessions you can practically hear my muscles tearing. After this I then employ the greatest recovery procedure known to man—rest. I’m not talking about just taking it easy for a few days, I’m talking about bed rest…like the kind you get when you give half of your liver to a random stranger you met in the line-up at Arby’s (trust me I know from experience).
To that you may ask either: Part Time Athlete did you really give half of your liver away? Or better yet, what were you doing at Arby’s? And my reply would be: (1) nope, (2) I was just there to watch someone else eat, I swear.
I have developed a simple formula to determine how much ‘rest’ I require after I push my body to achieve superhuman feats. From a scale of 1-10 rate how fit you think you are (F), then using the same scale rate how hard the task you just performed was (T). Then apply the formula: T-(F-2) = days off.
So if I am at a self estimated fitness level of F=6, and I just curled a beached narwhale with my left arm (T=9.5), then: 9.5-(6-2) = 5.5. I am entitled to 5.5 days of nothing.
I should note however that I am right-handed, the narwhale lived, and this formula has not been extensively peer-reviewed.
