Happy New Year! With a new calendar hanging on the wall, many of us look at the new year as a fresh start. This often serves as a jumping off point for self-renovation. Need to lose 15 pounds? This feels like to time to start. Want to run your first marathon? You start logging the miles. Have a chronic nagging injury? This is the year to become pain-free. With the new year, we tend to go all-in. What could go wrong?
A common pitfall is that we can become myopic. We focus on the goal and lose sight of the bigger picture. There is almost no clearer of an example as that of the person who buys a costly annual gym membership on January first, goes every day for a while, becomes burnt out, then never goes back. We bite off more than we can chew. We lose sight of what is reasonable. If you've had chronic back pain for 10 years, it may not be realistic to expect it to be cured after 2 or 3 sessions of physical therapy.
What are some ways we can inject some reason back into the equation? Here are three things that offer some balance to counteract just how intense we can all get during this time of year:
- Hydration - water flushes toxins from the body, transports nutrients into the cells and helps regulate body temperature and pH balance. Drink up.
- Nutrition - the short version is that your body functions better if you eat like an adult, eating vegetables and protein. The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) has a good blog post that goes into some of the nuances of the longer version.
- Sleep - your body does so much restoration and repair during sleep. Quality matters. NASM offers another post the addresses a few of the reasons why improving your sleep could make all the difference.
Whether you are overhauling your fitness, rehabbing an injury, or preparing for surgery, optimizing these three elements will pay dividends. For some additional reading, strength coach and author Dan John wrote a great article about these and other important elements of recovery.
