running

[Bombz]

Without going all Star Trek on everyone, this is a very well researched subject applied to lots of professional athletes - see below.

Why is it important to recover?
Overtraining is an imbalance between training/competition and recovery. Additional non-training stress factors and monotony of training may also contribute to overtraining syndrome. Whilst short-term overtraining can be seen as a normal part of athletic training long-term overtraining can lead to a state described as burnout or overtraining syndrome.

Well-timed rest is one of the most important factors of any training program. The effects of training sessions can be negligible or even detrimental if insufficient rest and recovery is built in.

During training, performance temporarily decreases but begins to rise during recovery. After a certain amount of time, performance rises above the pre-training level because the body is preparing to handle the next training load better than before.

If the body does not receive the next training load within a certain period of time any performance gain begins to slowly decrease. However if the next high intensity session is held before the body has recovered from the previous one performance will remain lower than it would have been after full recovery. Continuous hard training with insufficient recovery will slowly lead to lower performance and a long-term state of overtraining. When over-trained, even a long period of recovery may not be enough to return performance to the original level.

The body needs time for recovery after a single high intensity session, or a hard training period of several days, or even after a low intensity but long training session. Without rest adaptation to the training load will not occur.

The overload principle is an important aspect of training and can be quantified by training load, duration, frequency and rest. However application of excessive training stress or too many training sessions can result in exhaustion of the body’s physiological system. Numerous studies have demonstrated that overtraining from long-term stress or exhaustion is caused by a prolonged imbalance between training and other internal and external stressors and recovery.

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So, you'd suggest no pushups or pullups or crunches, etc on non boxing gym days? What if I feel I could've done more on my gym days? Should I just do those extras during my gym days instead?

I would suggest that. Depends really how many days and how much of a workout you are doing on your gym days. Even if you just set one day aside during the week to just relax your body and take it easy, that will help your body more than you know. It's like weightlifting, every other day builds muscle, because the human body needs to be able to build up, and rest. If you are going to be running on your off days, push ups and pull ups won't hurt bad, just don't max out and go to the gym sore.

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Hmmm, I may be doing something wrong then. I pretty much excercise every day. I always feel guilty if I have a day off and on running days I also incorporate the heavy bag & weights as soon as I get home after my run. How important is it to "rest"? Could I be doing more harm than good by running (30 mins), hitting the heavybag (30 mins) & pushing weights (30 mins) in a single session?

Exercising everyday is not bad at all, I do the same. However the intensity of the workout is what matters, like I said to bedhead, working out everyday will help you, just make sure there's some difference in between workout days and light days, because your body needs it.

Hitting the bag, lifting, and running for an hour and a half combined is not doing more harm than good at all, that's a good workout you have going there. Just incoporate something light one day during the week and if you're doing that right after coming back from the gym, that may be a bit excessive.