Decided that I needed to go back to working out properly after a two-week break. Call it a combination of Kiddo visiting and then having to go through a case of entertaining (Once you take booze, an intense work out isn’t going to help) which stopped me from doing my usual.
Anyway, decided to push through my “Mini-Mike” routine
(Aim for 10 percent of what Mike Tyson did in his prime – hence 50 push-ups, 75
bench dips, 90 Australian rows and 200 body-weight squats) and when I woke up,
I wondered why I wasn’t particularly horny. Decided to check with Deepseek, which
advised that there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with me, except that the
body was telling me it needed more time to recover. True enough, the body only
recovered after a lunch of mutton biryani (protein and carbs to refuel muscle
glycogen).
I delve into this because there is a very basic part
of exercise science that most people overlook. This is the fact that there are
three pillars that create muscle growth and strengthening and exercise is only
one of the pillars. The other two are diet and rest. The way it works is simple
– exercise creates damage to the muscle, and the body then repairs the damage
making each muscle fiber thicker and stronger than before the exercise (diet
provides the fuel for the repair and rest is when the repair actually happens).
https://denpedia.com/muscle-growth-and-repair-building-strength-and-recovery/
This is something most of ordinary Joes don’t always
understand. For those of us who get health conscious in “old age,” the process looks
something like this – we move a bit more than we used to and we adjust our
diets. The one great pillar that we tend to over look is rest or more
specifically sleep. I am guilty of this. I move more in my late forties and
early fifties than I did in my twenties and thirties. I probably eat better now
too (less visits to Fast Food joints, less booze and even less soft drinks).
However, the temptation to sleep late remains strong and I end up sleeping less
than the full eight hours.
If anything, modern culture tends to demean sleep. I
think of all the “energized” old-dudes who keep tell you that you’ve only lived
40-years when you reach 60 because you spent 20-years fast asleep. When you’re young
(twenties and thirties), you want to have fun so, you sneak party hours into
sleep hours. I think of the wild parties I had with my neighbours when I was
back in university. The neighbours were Swedes and one of my best friends was a
Finn. We’d drinks ourselves silly on good old-fashioned vodka (the battle being
between Absolut and Finlandia). We’d crash and some unearthly hour and yet, the
one guy who had a job managed to get up and go to work looking absolutely fresh.
It helped that we were all in our twenties back then.
There are certain things which are good fun when you’re
in your twenties that should not be done when you’re in your fifties. The
reason is simple; the body starts to show signs of wear and tear. The process
of healing which worked so well in a twenty-year old body works less well in a
fifty-year-old one. Hence, a fifty-year old needs to pace him or herself
properly if they tend to last in their jobs. Yet, we continue to support a
toxic culture of machismo, where you get 50 something year old's who still brag
about working late nights and the expense of their sleep.
This shouldn’t be the case. Rest and sleep regenerate
the human body and mind, thus allowing the human being to be productive. If you
want people to be productive, you need to see to it that they are rested and tearing
themselves down. Creating a culture where employees feel it’s “uncool” to rest leads
to low productivity and non-productive, who in turn lead to a slugging economy that
grows old.
