Listen to Your Body's Signals, and Learn to Tell Them Apart

The body is more honest than the mind. It doesn't lie. It only goes silent or cries out. – Kafka, Diaries

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Yesterday morning I walked out of the gym feeling completely out of it.

Thinking back, the first thought in my head when I woke up was: I don't want to train today, I'm so tired.

Lately I've been sleeping over seven and a half hours every night, but I can clearly tell the quality is poor. My eyelids feel heavy when I wake up.

Still, I got up, ate breakfast, grabbed my gym bag and went to train.

There was no reason for pushing through except this: yesterday was day three of my three-day upper-body split, and finishing it would complete one cycle. I didn't want to break the balance, so I went.

After training, I decided to take a few days off.

For the next few days I won't train or ride. I'll only keep up a certain amount of walking.

On diet, I won't be as strict as before. I'll loosen up a bit, but not let go.

On the walk home from the gym, I messaged Zhang Jiahua: "When I got up today I really didn't feel like training, but since it was the last day of the cycle, I went."

Zhang Jiahua said: "That's self-discipline. Training when you don't feel like it is what counts. If you always feel like it, that's just indulgence."

Don't get me wrong, he's got a point.

But I don't think this not-wanting-to-train feeling comes from laziness.

"Training even when you don't feel like it": I think the "don't feel like it" here should be understood in the context of laziness. And within that framework, I found I should first separate two things: does my reluctance come from laziness, or from somewhere else?

I've mentioned in earlier posts that I can be someone who's very attached to regularity.

What do I mean? I often look at what stage I'm in on something from a big-picture view.

Take working out. For the past month or more, I've trained regularly and my training volume has kept rising. Since April, I've also been strictly controlling my diet, limiting fat and sodium.

That has drained my energy further.

So what stage am I at now? After a stretch of high-intensity training, my body has entered a fatigue phase. A single layer of clothing doesn't normally feel cold, but now it feels a little chilly.

That's actually a sign of physical fatigue. If I ignore it and keep training, it could develop into overtraining syndrome (not that I'm anywhere near that. This is just extrapolating forward).

Here's what I concluded from analyzing my current situation:

• Trained regularly for over 45 days
• Half a month on a low-fat, low-sodium diet
• Training makes the body tired
• A low-sodium diet drains mental energy

Stack those up, and even after a full day of rest, I still feel a bit tired.

Even now, while I write this, my mood is on the low side. Luckily, thinking about it dialectically, my thoughts are still fairly clear.

That brings me back to the question above: how do I tell whether I'm really being lazy, or my body is sending me a signal?

This matters a lot, because choosing differently in these two situations will each affect my life.

Being lazy:

• Choose to train: you progress and stay disciplined
• Choose not to train: you slide back and lose motivation

A body signal:

• Choose to train: you might get hurt, binge, or fall into a slump
• Choose not to train: you recover better thanks to the rest

To me, this method and ability to identify my own motives is the ability to tell appearance from essence.

Essence and appearance are a very basic pair of categories in materialist dialectics.

Essence is the inner, relatively stable fundamental nature of a thing, and it directly shapes the direction in which its contradictions develop.

Appearance is the outer, changeable surface of a thing, easy to observe.

Let me use this principle to sort out my situation.

First, whether I'm simply being lazy or my body is warning me, what I show is the same: I don't want to go to the gym, and I feel weak all over.

That's the appearance.

• If I don't want to train out of plain laziness, then the drive should come only from slackening willpower, a mental and emotional avoidance of training, and my body should not be tired at all. That's fatigue of the mind.
• If I don't want to train because my body is truly exhausted and under-recovered, then it's an objective fatigue apart from my mind. I really am tired.

Those are two different essences.

So how do I tell which one I am?

First, if I were just lazy, I'd definitely be bright and lively doing other things. But in fact, apart from training, I have little energy most of the rest of the time too. I can't focus on reading or writing, and my heart rate goes up when I just stroll outside. None of that would happen if I were just being lazy.

Second, the signs of physical fatigue have causes behind them. After more than a month of continuous training and half a month on a low-fat diet, in a long calorie deficit, feeling reluctant to train is bound to happen.

Keep training → keep a low-fat diet → body fatigue → don't want to train

That's a very clear development path that follows the rules. And there's no good reason to support the view that "I'm just being lazy."

I'm not someone who never gets lazy. When I'm lazy and don't want to train, it's usually because something put me in a bad mood, or I slept badly and don't feel like moving. Causes like that are usually one-offs, unrelated to long-term training.

So I chose to rest, and not just for a day. I'll rest until I feel energetic even without training, and only then start my next session.

Listening to your body's signals matters. But learning to tell whether those signals are the truth or an illusion matters just as much.