Should I work out today if I did not sleep well last night? Well, that is a good question and that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I was on a call this morning with a former professional Ironman triathlete. This guy is the real deal. He is not lazy. He is not unmotivated. He is not unathletic. He is a top tier kind of athletic guy, and he is very, very aware of his body, and the process of damaging tissue, and healing it to make it stronger. That process we call training.
What he also understands is that the process of healing a ligament sprain is the same thing. It is the exact same process, and so we were on this call talking about this ligament sprain he had, and he wanted to work out, and he has been working out, but during our call this morning, he actually pointed out that he barely slept last night, and since he had this plan to ride on the trainer today, we were talking about this, and he used a term I hadn’t heard before. He said it was multifaceted negatives. It is.
So, you didn’t sleep, right? You don’t feel good, number one. You’re not going to feel motivated or feel strong. Number two, your hormones are off when you don’t sleep well. You are not really in a good state for a number of different reasons, and if you already have an injury that is not healing and not progressing as fast as you want to, and you’re underslept, you’re under hydrated, you haven’t eaten well, or you haven’t taken care of yourself in some other way, those additional forms of stress that come from not sleeping well, compound the difficulty with healing the injured tissue.
You cannot ever get stronger without sleeping, right? There’s no overtraining. There’s only under-recovering, but the recovery comes when you sleep. It’s not that you worked out too much. It’s that you didn’t rest enough and recover enough. You don’t get stronger at all unless you’re sleeping and resting appropriately during those periods after you’ve worked out and damaged the tissue, and then you’re trying to heal it and get it to recover.
So, whenever you are recovering from an overtraining injury and you get what seems like you’re stuck in this process where you’re not completely healed, you’re not really back to full activity, and you’re adding in a trainer or running on a special treadmill that reduces the force of gravity or something like that, and you’re already modifying your routine.
If your sleep gets reduced and you know that it’s going to affect your ability to actually recover from that workout, you probably want to dial it back a little bit, at least for that day.
If you like this episode, hopefully you’ll come join me in something like the Plantar Plate Masterclass. The strategies that I use with athletes like this guy today who had this ligament sprain, like one of the smallest ligaments in your foot is called the plantar plate.
If you’ve had one of those injuries and that is why you’re watching this episode, well, you ought to check out the Plantar Plate Masterclass. It’s where I go into a deep dive on the strategies I use with athletes that have those kind of injuries and want to get back to running faster. You can get it for free at www.docontherun.com/plantarplatemasterclass. Come check it out and I will see you in the training.
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