03: Stop Fearing Fatigue. Stop Chasing Fatigue.

A lot of people think feeling tired, sore, or heavy after training means something is wrong. In this episode, I break down why fatigue itself is not the problem and how misunderstanding it can make training feel way more confusing than it needs to be.

In this episode, I walk through five common ways people misinterpret fatigue, including mistaking it for progress, assuming it means progress has stalled, and changing programs instead of letting adaptation happen.

FREE STUFF

Follow @laurelbeversdorf on Instagram

Follow @laurel_beversdorf on YouTube

www.laurelbeversdorf.com

EPISODE RESOURCES

Watch on YouTube: How to Schedule Strength and Cardio for Better Recovery

Laurel's other podcast Movement Logic: Strong Opinions Loosely Held

TIMESTAMPS

01:05 Fatigue is not the stimulus
04:10 Fatigue can mask progress
07:05 Why changing things up can backfire
11:20 You do not need to feel fully recovered to train again
17:15 Why fatigue does not stay this high forever
22:10 What fatigue is and what it is not
24:05 Watch the YouTube video for weekly training structure

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Many people think feeling fatigue from training is a problem. When the real problem is how people interpret fatigue and then what they choose to do about it. When we're consistent, we make progress. And when we make progress, we gain momentum. With momentum, consistency is met with less resistance. And before long, we're stronger, fitter, we feel better. And our entire relationship with exercise is different. Because we're different. We're not people who struggle to exercise anymore. We're people who struggle to imagine our lives without it. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf. I help people build strength and endurance in ways they can actually stick to. If you've ever wondered what to focus on, what to ignore, or how to make strength and cardio feel doable with the time, energy, and equipment you have, you're in the right place. A lot of people assume that if they feel tired, sore, or heavy after training, something is wrong with their training. They think they're doing too much, they're not recovering enough, or that they need a different program. And sometimes this is all true. But most of the time the issue isn't that they're fatigued or even that they aren't recovered. Most of the time, the issue is that fatigue starts to become misinterpreted. It tends to get misinterpreted in a few very predictable ways. So in this episode, I'm going to go through five ways that I see people getting fatigue wrong and why understanding fatigue can make your training feel a lot less confusing. So way number one that people misinterpret fatigue is that they mistake fatigue as the stimulus. A stimulus is a stressor from training that makes a change to our fitness. So people feel fatigued after training, and since they feel really tired, they think that that means that the workout was effective to make a change. And if they don't feel fatigued, they assume that the workout wasn't effective and that it didn't make a change. But here's the thing, fatigue by itself doesn't really tell us very much at all because fatigue is not the stimulus. The stimulus is the work that you actually did in the training. The stimulus is the load you lifted, the distance you ran, the intensity you trained at, and the amount of work your body had to do. Fatigue is just the short-term cost of that work. For example, two workouts can create very different amounts of fatigue for two different people, but produce a similar adaptation for them. Likewise, you can have a very fatiguing workout that doesn't move you forward very much in the realms of strength or respiratory fitness. Likewise, you can have a very productive workout that does move you forward, but that doesn't leave you feeling wrecked. So if you judge your training based on how fatigued you feel afterwards, you can become easily misled. What matters more for whether or not your training is working is whether or not your performance changes over time. Are you lifting more weight in the exercises you're training? Are you able to run farther or faster? Does the same workout start to feel easier after a few weeks or months? These are all signs of adaptation, not how tired you feel after the session. Although, and we'll talk about it, as your fitness increases, oftentimes you feel less fatigue from the same amount of training. Okay, way number two that people misunderstand fatigue is that they misunderstand the fact that fatigue can often mask or hide the progress that we're making towards fitness. And this is where it's good to talk about the fitness fatigue model because it helps explain what is going on. In exercise science, we often describe training as producing two things at the same time. Every workout creates both fitness, which is a longer lasting positive adaptation, but every workout also creates fatigue, which is a short-term negative effect that temporarily makes our performance worse. So right after you strength train, you are actually less strong than you were before you started that workout, not more. Right after a long run, your endurance is actually temporarily worse, not better than it was before you started the run. But then you recover and your fatigue drops off, but the fitness comes back up higher than it was before. But if you don't understand this process and you're training a lot and you're experiencing fatigue on a daily basis, it's easy to think that you're not progressing in your workouts, that something is wrong because you don't actually feel your performance improving. You just feel tired all the time. And then you might think you need a completely different program when what you really just need is some more recovery. You need some more time, possibly between challenging exercise sessions, so that the fatigue can dissipate and reveal the fitness you've built. So fatigue masks fitness, fatigue is temporary, fitness lasts longer. And when we've accumulated a lot of fatigue and we train through fatigue, it can be easy to think that we aren't actually building fitness with the training we're doing. When in essence, if we were to just wait and allow for a little bit more recovery, that fitness would be revealed. Way number three is that people respond to their fatigue by changing things up. So let me explain. When people feel tired, sore, beat up from whatever form of training they're doing, whether it's they started strength training or they started doing HIT classes or they started running or uh maybe cycling, their first instinct when they start to accumulate fatigue from this training, maybe it's multiple different ways of training, their first instinct is to often change things up, change the program, or maybe just abandon a certain way of training entirely and try something else. Because again, they think that the fatigue signals that the current training just isn't working. But the irony there is that actually novelty, new exercise formats, like engaging in a new way of exercising actually produces more fatigue at the onset of beginning training, not less. So when something is new, an exercise stimulus is new to your body, your body's not as efficient at the movement, it's gonna require more energy, you might incur more muscle damage, as a result, you're gonna get more soreness and feel more tired after that way of training. And it's gonna also not be as efficient at recovering. And so if you start doing a particular style of exercise and feel fatigue, and then decide that, you know what, I'm too fatigued, so I'm gonna start this completely new way of exercising. What could happen is that you just enter into a different type of fatigue that remains high because you're continuing to engage in novel exercise. This is why program hopping, changing it up every four to six weeks and doing something completely different, not sticking with something for long enough for it to really change your fitness and for your recovery to improve, is a little bit like digging lots of shallow holes. You're never really going to get anywhere meaningful with your fitness. You're possibly also going to be managing more, not less fatigue with this approach. Here's where I think it's helpful to understand something called the repeat bout effect. The repeat bout effect is when you repeat the same type of training over time, your body gets better at handling that type of stress and that same type of training, even as it is progressing, even as it is increasing possibly in duration or intensity, actually produces less total soreness. You actually recover faster from it and you can do more work within it with less fatigue. This is a really good sign. It means that your body is adapting and your fitness is improving. But if you keep changing up the exercises constantly, changing the programs or jumping between different types of training all the time, you're gonna stay in that high fatigue phase. You know, jumping around from traditional strength training to orange theory to CrossFit, now I'm gonna try kettlebells, and you don't really stick with any particular type of training for any amount of time, everything is going to kind of always feel hard. And then also nothing is going to improve very much. So sometimes feeling tired doesn't mean you need a different workout. It actually means you need more consistency with that workout, the one you're already doing. Way number four that people are confused about fatigue is that sometimes they think they need to feel fully recovered before they train again. Uh a lot of people think that the goal is to wait until they feel completely fresh before they do the next workout that is the same type of workout, or even do a completely different type of workout. Say they need to be completely fresh from strength training before they go and do some cardio, or they need to be completely fresh from cardio before they lift some weights, or they need to be completely fresh from one bout of strength training before they do another bout of strength training. But that's not true. You can actually train while experiencing some fatigue, and in fact, training while experiencing muscle fatigue can actually be a great way to reduce the feeling of muscle fatigue, right? So training can actually be an analgesic from uh muscle fatigue, which is fascinating. Movement makes a lot of things feel better. Um, it can even make the fatigue from movement feel better. Another thing to keep in mind about this needing to feel fully recovered before training again is that if this is the case, we'll probably end up training less, not more. And exercise has a dose response relationship to health and longevity. Right? In general, doing more exercise leads to more adaptation and more fitness. Fitness corresponds in many regards with health and longevity. So as long as the total amount of exercise you're doing stays within realms that you can positively recover from over time, even though you're training under some amount of fatigue, whether it's a little bit less or a little bit more, this is going to drive your fitness up and it's gonna, as a result, probably positively influence your health. So you do not need to be fully recovered to benefit from the next training session. You don't even really need to be fully recovered in the exact same muscle group that you're going to train. Of course, there is such a thing as overdoing it. There is such a thing as being under-recovered to the point of a training session maybe being wholly unproductive. You know, it's not black or white, but the idea that you have to be fully recovered before you train again is simply not true. One of the skills you develop over time if you engage consistently in exercise, especially when you're consistent with a specific type of exercise, is learning how to keep training while recovery is happening and learning your limits, learning how much is enough and learning how much is too much. Sometimes we learn that the hard way. But then also learning how much you can actually tolerate, pushing the envelope gradually, but consistently in the direction of improving your ability to tolerate more exercise, not less. So in a YouTube video that I recorded recently, which I will link in the show notes, I walk through three different ways to think about the exercise stress that whatever workout you're doing incurs, and then how to position those types of stressors in the week, whether it's a strength training stressor, a cardio stressor, an upper versus a lower body stressor. So watch that YouTube video for some visual representations of how to organize your week of training. This is especially helpful if you train most days of the week and if you engage in different forms of exercise, like strength training, cardio, and then also if you do yoga or Pilates. Something that we discuss in the YouTube video is strategizing workouts that might target your lower body more and putting them next to workouts that might target your upper body more is a good way to spread fatigue out so that while your lower body is recovering, you're still able to train your upper body. It might also mean learning how to put easier cardio alongside harder lifting sessions or shorter lifting sessions alongside harder cardio sessions. Remember that training can actually reduce feelings of fatigue from previous sessions, especially when that subsequent training is light or moderate exercise. It can help to improve blood flow, improve energy delivery, and simply get you moving so that you feel better, not only because of that light to moderate exercise you did, but because you've actually alleviated some of the fatigue you accumulated from the harder session previous. But again, the goal is not to eliminate fatigue. It's not to never feel fatigued. When you feel fatigue, it's not a sign you did anything wrong. And in fact, if you never feel fatigued from training, I would take that possibly as a clue that you might not be training hard enough to stimulate the changes you're looking for. Remember that the stimulus is the effect that creates the change, right? And fatigue is not the stimulus, but stimulating workouts frequently cause fatigue. So fatigue is nothing to fear, but likewise it's nothing to chase either, because the repeat bout effect means that as you engage in similar types of training, you actually get better at managing fatigue, your work capacity improves, you're able to handle more. So even as you're driving your fitness upward with a certain type of training, you're experiencing less fatigue. And that experience of less fatigue is also not a sign that your training isn't working. If you're improving in performance, your training is working. And the good news is now because you've developed more tolerance for that training, better work capacity, because of the repeat bout effect, you're experiencing less fatigue. So you can handle more training, right? So this brings us to misunderstanding number five, which is that people often think that when they start doing a type of exercise and they experience a considerable amount of fatigue from it, they think that it's always going to be that way. They think that they're just going to have to resign to feeling this amount of muscle soreness, this amount of stiffness from this type of training for the rest of their lives. And that in their mind becomes kind of a real negative or a turn off for that type of training. They assume that if something feels hard and fatiguing now, it will always feel like that. But because of the repeat bout effect, because of our ability to improve our work capacity and simply tolerate more total work over the week, this is not the case. First, acutely it's not the case because remember, fatigue is temporary. So you will probably feel a little bit of muscle soreness when you start resistance training. It shouldn't last for much more than 48 hours. You will probably feel muscle soreness when you start doing cardio as well. And again, it shouldn't last for more than 48 hours. And then it starts to actually go down and disappear. Your fitness elevates, and the good news is the changes to fitness stick around. They are not as temporary as fatigue. Right. So that's the fitness-fatigue model we talked about earlier. But there's also this long-term change that happens with training where we actually get better at recovering from our workouts. We experience less fatigue from them as we get fitter, right? We improve our work capacity. When our work capacity improves, we're able to train more, we're able to train more frequently or longer during the week, or work at higher intensities during the week, and we just continue like that to continue to push the envelope on our work capacity and drive our fitness upward. Because again, exercise and health have a dose response relationship more is generally better. Typically, when more starts to produce negative effects, it's because of a mismanagement of training load, which can look like positioning your workouts unstrategically during the week. Watch the YouTube video for strategic scheduling of different types of workouts, but it can also just mean that you increased too much, whether it be intensity, duration, frequency. When workload is managed well, as long as there isn't some pathological addiction involved where you're truly over-exercising, which is rare, more exercise is generally better. It can't all be high intensity, that's for sure. It can't all be long duration either, that's for sure. But staying more active more days of the week is generally going to be better for your health. Learning how to manage workload is learning how to manage recovery. And getting better at this is very important for knowing how to stay active every day, how to make changes to your fitness in multiple different areas at the same time, respiratory endurance and strength, maybe also mobility, and also movement skill. If you do this correctly after months and years of consistent training, you will inevitably be able to do more exercise more often and recover more quickly from it. Not because the workouts are getting easier, but because your body is simply fitter and better at handling the stress. So if we put all this together, let's remember what fatigue is and what it isn't. So fatigue is not the stimulus. It's not a sign that anything improved, and it's also not a sign that anything's wrong. Fatigue can mask your progress. So again, we can't look to fatigue to know if we're improving. Fatigue generally is higher when exercise is new or novel. We don't need to completely eliminate fatigue to be able to keep training. And over time, engaging in the same type of training will improve your fitness within that training and make you better at recovering from that exercise stress, which will probably speed up your recovery and will simply make you able to tolerate more of that type of training throughout the week. So if you found this conversation interesting and you want a more practical how-to to help you understand how to arrange your training during the week, strength, cardio, yoga, dance classes, you want to know how do I arrange my week so that I can keep doing all these things without feeling under recovered or wrecked all the time, head to the show notes and give a watch to my latest YouTube video. That's all for this week. Thanks for tuning in to the Practical Fitness Podcast. Thank you to the seven of you who have left a five-star rating. And thank you so much to Leah KR. Leah writes, Laurel is an excellent wealth of knowledge. Even the first two episodes of this podcast have given me new ideas to implement in my strength practice. So thankful for all the resources Laurel puts out into the world. From her two podcasts, her Instagram, her online membership, her movement logic tutorials, and her lift for longevity program. I've benefited from them all. I appreciate her research-based approach, her commitment to updating her understanding, her sense of humor, and the way she teaches. Five billion stars, highly recommend. Leah, that made me feel so good to read. Thank you so much for leaving that. Folks, I will link some of this stuff in the show notes. Uh because why not? Uh, and again, thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you in two weeks.