recovery under stress

There was a popular health and fitness author in the 80s named Covert Bailey who used to talk about the importance of what he called "recovery under stress" in cardio exercise. The idea was to boost your workouts by including occasional brief bursts of high intensity activity amidst your lower intensity exercise.

An example would be to sprinkle your fitness walk with a few 20-30 second jogs or sprints. The most valuable part of this strategy to your cardiovascular system, as I recall, was not the sprint itself, but the work your body did to recover from the sprint while you continued to walk afterward.

Lately, I've been thinking about the concept of recovery under stress in another context: my mother's cancer treatment. The old paradigm for cancer patients was to rest as much as possible and try not to exert yourself, but today the medical world has figured out that patients who remain active and engaged in life tend to have better outcomes. This doesn't mean that patients never need to modify their activities, of course, but it does mean that waiting until they feel better to start moving, eating well, and actively participating in their lives isn't usually advisable. In other words, don't wait until you complete your treatment to live your life.

As a world-class procrastinator, I am forever coming up against the temptation to wait to act on any number of things until conditions are more favorable. Recovery, whether from a bad cold or a break-up, a serious illness or an addiction, can be a socially acceptable excuse not to act on things, but one I don't recommend overindulgence in. Modify your intensity or adjust your expectations, perhaps, but don't give up on important things, especially if they have the potential to contribute to your recovery. As with the cardio example above, walk as slowly as you need to after a sprint, but don't stop dead still.

The concept extends to all kinds projects which are important to us but we put off because the time never seems right. There is no perfect time. Once we've done what we reasonably can to prepare, at some point we just have to leap. If we stumble as a result... well, we'll have yet another opportunity to recover under stress.

And there's another obvious reason not to wait until the perfect time or until we think the circumstances will be the most favorable: Opportunities have an expiration date that you can't always see in advance. If you make a habit of always waiting, you'll wake up one day and realize it's too late to do many of those important things you've been meaning to do but never quite got around to. Once again, perfectionism robs us of experiences we could have had without all that added stress and anxiety, simply by allowing ourselves to do things imperfectly.

With all this in mind, I spent some time at Callaway Gardens yesterday afternoon, while the azaleas were in full bloom. I had plenty of other things to do, but spring doesn't last forever, and beautiful sunny days are a gift to be enjoyed. I'm grateful that I was able to go.