Know When you are Over-Exercising

We used to say, “No pain, no gain,” meaning, if you exercise long and hard enough, you can whip your body into shape and lose the flab that is holding you back in every area of your life. If you believe that, you may also believe that you have not worked out hard enough unless you sweat. That probably means you are over-exercising and, because you probably are dieting as well, you may not be eating enough to match your activity level to your current metabolism.

This is a trap many of us get caught in: we work out until we ache and burn, and we get bigger and stronger, but not necessarily slimmer and smaller. To overcome the fatigue fog we are walking around in from over-exercising, we push ourselves even harder, thinking we are doing what is best for our bodies and our health. In reality, we are only escalating our post-menopause aging. For an overview of why exercise is vital to our health and longevity in menopause and after, see, Our Bodies, Our Lives.

Over-exercising: More Harm than Good

When you over-exercise, you raise your adrenaline and cortisol levels, says endocrinologist Diana Schwarzbein, MD. If your adrenaline (the “fight or flight” hormone) is higher than your cortisol (the stress hormone), you use up your fat, protein, and sugar stores. When your cortisol level is higher than adrenaline, you use up protein (muscle tissue) and sugar (stored in muscles and liver), and deposit more fat around your mid-section. Cortisol causes a redistribution of fat from your arms and legs to your middle. Either way, you are undermining your metabolism and not getting the results you want.

Over-exercising at the beginning of a new workout program can lead to fatigue, stiffness, and pain. These discomforts may keep you from sticking to an exercise routine, despite your good intentions. Exercising to burn body fat can cause loss of muscle mass, or cause fats to redistribute instead of burning away, results that undermine your metabolism and leave you frustrated with exercising.

When you over-exercise, you boost your adrenaline and cortisol levels. In addition, over-exercising can lead to insulin resistence. Your insulin level rises in order to keep you from using up your body’s muscles and fat tissue (it’s a built-in defense), needed for rebuilding those tissues. Over-exercising can also lead to injuries. Your soft tissues, which are made of protein, break down as a result of protein-wasting.

Under-Exercising is an Easy Habit to Slip Into

Under-exercising is also a problem. How many times have you come home from work and collapsed on the couch or in the recliner at the end of the day, mentally exhausted and emotionally spent. You relax with something cold and alcoholic while taking time out from life and watching TV. You may grab a snack and wait for dinner to be delivered from the kitchen by your mate or from the local take-out shop. You are pretty much done for the day, good intentions aside.

When you pause the TV for the commercial, think about the plan you had to join a gym and start working out. Every time the idea pops back into your head, you probably think of all the reasons why you can’t do it this week or month. There is always a better time somewhere over the rainbow.

Maybe you actually start an exercise program and stick with it for a while. Then you get super-busy at work, or roped into planning a family event, or enticed into joining a group of best friends on a fishing trip to the Outer Banks. You quit your workout routine, with every intention of starting back in a few weeks, when you get home from the trip. Whoops! Each time you quit and then try to make a comeback, it gets harder, have you noticed?

Instead of quitting when life tightens the screws on you, reprogram. If mornings no longer work, try walking mid-day. If you don’t have enough time at lunch, try three 10-minute walks at different times in the day. Save longer challenges for the weekend. Another idea is to commit to one or two exercise buddies for your daily exertion. If they are depending on you, it will make it harder to give up your exercise commitment. Have you thought of a business meeting on the hoof? It works if neither of you are in training for a marathon. The idea is to slip exercise into the day’s agenda and make it serve dual purposes. Now that’s multi-tasking!

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