30 Day Challenge #3: HIT THE GYM

I'm going to keep this simple: BE ACTIVE.

I don't care if you're working out in an old school meat-head gym, doing CrossFit, playing flag football after work with some friends, or walking around your neighborhood. This is your mission this month:

DO SOMETHING EACH AND EVERY DAY!

Post back what you did each day.

Now some advice for those of you who will be working out doing strength training...

1. Why are you in the gym? To get bigger and stronger, right? Well guess what doesn't happen in the gym... that's right, gains. Those all happen outside of the gym and THAT is why recovery is so god damn important. Way too many guys are simply doing too much volume in a given session and/or working out too many times a week wondering why they're not seeing any improvements, or are retarding the improvements they would have gotten had they worked out smarter.

   Working out is just the stimulus to cause your body to make adaptations. Those adaptations (eg size and strength gains) happen during recovery.

2. The secret that took my 26 years to learn is that you really only need to work out hard enough to be sore the next day or 2.

   Muscle soreness does not correlate to adaptations.

   If you're working out so hard that your body is just destroyed and you can't hit the gym fresh in 48 hours, then you're doing it wrong! This is really my #1 criticism of CrossFit due to it's high-intensity nature. Having a constantly inflamed body from tearing yourself down too much and too often is going to give you problems when you're older, there's really no practical benefit to doing so in the present, and it is the fast lane to over-training which can lead to some very serious and sometimes debilitating injuries.