Beast Mode: Burnout and what to do about it

Beast Mode is wearing on me. In fact, over the last week and especially for the last three days, despite doing some decent workouts and training in that time, I definitely cannot call what's going on "Beast Mode" any longer. I hit burnout, which I could have predicted. It's beyond the problem characterized in my last post about not having enough to eat for my training (which I've decided is mostly because of my head injury leading to a wrecked sense of smell and therefore taste leading to almost everything currently tasting really bad, sort of like vomit). This is straight up "I've done enough hard workouts for now" style burnout.

Burnout happens when you overdo it consistently over a period of time. After some reading over the last few days, I've learned that pretty much any time you go overboard with working out (or anything) consistently day after day, you kind of just burn out on it. I don't fully understand the mechanisms behind burnout yet, particularly in the short term like this, but if I find/make the time to study it and learn, I'll post it on here and educate people some more about it.

What does burnout feel like? Well... it feels like just not wanting to train, even after I start training. Simultaneous thoughts of the importance of pushing through the wall and being unable to see the point wage war in my head, and when I do overcome the nagging, illusory voice telling me that it's pointless, there's no sense of accomplishment that comes from the workout. In fact, I hate doing it and don't even really feel good about having done it when I'm finished. That's what burnout feels like.

What have I noticed helps to deal with it?

• Taking breaks -- While still subscribing to "never zero," taking a break from such serious training seems to rekindle the fire and enthusiasm. In the context of training Yin Style, I've found that narrowing my focus to turning or standing strengthening practice and cutting back on the total amount of time helps quite a bit.
• Switching gears -- Staying interested often means doing something new. This is part of that mechanism thing that I don't really understand, but it's related to dopamine and the reward circuitry of the brain. Repetitive workouts quickly become dull, and so switching gears to something completely different and still physical seems to keep me active when I'm burnt out. For instance, we (my wife and I) did a little walk/jog last night, and that was fun. I'm kind of desperate for more hard-core yard work to do, even though I don't qualify it as a real workout. It's different, and that makes it fun. It's challenging in ways, and that makes it rewarding.
• Planning -- I'm not sure I can overemphasize this. Creating a plan of future action when burnout starts to set in gives me time to get creative and to focus myself on your next several days of training and working out. By creating a plan and then posting it somewhere highly visible, it kind of forces me to stick to the intended workout. Just remember my first rule of planning workouts: Workouts are far easier to write down than they are to do!
• Goal-setting -- Yet another aspect that seems to be unable to be overemphasized. Every time burnout starts to eat at me, I find strength and will to overcome it by sitting down and rereading, re-evaluating, rewriting, restructuring, revising, and re-posting my current training and fitness goals, particularly for the short term. Spending an hour with my goals and putting them somewhere that I can't hide from them does incredible wonders for my motivation and commitment. What I usually try to do is reread my longer-term goals and make few, if any, changes to those. Then I completely revamp my short-term goals and make some changes to my medium-term goals to continually evaluate where I am against where I want to get, creating the map to get there as I go. I wrote a more detailed post about setting goals a few months ago. Check it out.

So... going ape-shit for a while might just burn you out. It definitely did me. Of course, I've got a wicked workout planned for both today and tomorrow to get fully back on the horse. Hopefully, I'll find some time to get on here and share those with you!