Emotional Shit

Although, this blog is all about getting healthy and working out, there are important parts of life that are not to be ignored, or else they can F up your goals.

For the first time in my life, I've overtrained. What is overtraining? Wikipedia sez:

Overtraining is a physical, behavioral, and emotional condition that occurs when the volume and intensity of an individual's exercise exceeds their recovery capacity.

I went to Kettle Bell class, and nearly died from exhaustion (not literally of course) during the first round of circuit training. A friend suggested overtraining. I thought he was crazy and went swimming regardless. While swimming I felt like I was drowning, and I had only been swimming for less than 10 minutes. Okay, maybe I was suffering from overtraining. Following his advice, I took a week off to heal, and cut out calories since  I wasn't working out.

One week later, I hit the gym. Good god! Overtraining was gone! Since then, I've been varying my training more (allowing about 48 hours on lifting for arms and legs), and taking extra care to watch my caloric intake (including carbs/protein/veggie/fruit intake), and my sleeping patterns.

Now look at this pic of Boo from Monster's Inc. Aww...sad right? Wait are you tearing up? Are you crying? Whoa, someone's in a need of an emotional shit!

An emotional shit, as my Japanese TA who didn't fully understand American taboos, described it as a time when you just need to cry, because you are so full of emotion (for whatever reason). I believe Dane Cook said it was when the World tapped you on the shoulder and whispered, "you're gonna cry today."

Yeah. That's an emotional shit alright. In theory, you should just start crying until you're done. Sometimes you need help to get started or stop. I'm a big fan of sad movies and songs for help. Once started, I just let it flow, and never rush it out too quickly, or else I'd run the risk of giving myself an emotional hernia! (There's a joke in there somewhere).

The other day I was feeling it. The need for an emotional shit. I'm not sure why, but it seems like a lot of little things were bothering me. It was starting to hurt my exercise performance too, usually popping up while I was watching TV in the cardio room, or listening to a song on my MP3 player that reminded me of something sad. I'm a big believer in the importance of taking emotional shits, now and again! So I proceeded to watch a few sad scenes on YouTube: the scene where Sam dies in I am Legend almost always does it for me, for a variety of reasons.

From there, I hit a few other YouTube video suggestions, followed by sad music and I was gone. I took my emotional shit and stopped. Emotionally wiped, I crawled into bed and fell asleep. It was one of the best nights of sleep I've had in a long time.

So, have you taken your emotional shit lately? Take a moment and go unload on the universe. The world is full of shit that can weigh a person down. Be careful when visiting dark moments in your past. Don't go too deep, or you may end up in Inception limbo!