Did you make any fitness, nutrition, or health goals at the beginning of the year? Then you’ve likely been working hard towards those goals for a good 6 weeks at this point. Unfortunately, that’s also the time that some begin to experience the following symptoms:

• desire to quit
• energy depletion
• muscle or joint pain
• aggravation
• difficulty sleeping

Also known as burn out. After weeks and weeks of tough workouts and eating in a nutritional deficit, burn out can be a threat. And if you keep doing what you’re doing once burn out signals start to pop up, it could lead to the dissolve of your goals.

Avoiding Burn Out

But the good news is: it can be avoided! When burn out starts to strike, the best thing you can do is ease up from your training and diet. In fact, every 8-12 weeks I strongly suggest that my clients take at least 1 week off – or at least a severe deload –  from training, and to eat at maintenance (if they’ve been in a deficit) during that week.

Taking periodic breaks from training allow your body to recover and recuperate more fully so that when you come back, you’ll be even stronger. If you’re trying to lose weight, taking a break from eating at a deficit allows your metabolism to speed back up. Not to mention, that break also does wonders for the psyche. It’s likely that after a week off, you’ll be excited to get back to it.

In addition to planned, periodic break, it’s also important to monitor your stress and anxiety levels in other areas of life. For example, right now I’m backing the eff off of intense workouts like hill sprints, trail running, and very intense lifting.

While I normally have a very low stress level, I feel stress immediately. Right now I have a couple exciting, but stressful writing and fitness assignments coming up, it’s tax season as a small business owner, and my husband and I just bought a house. All exciting, but all stressful. Until I feel that stress affecting me less, my workouts will be more moderate.

Banish Burn Out: Plan of Attack

1. Assess the stress in your life.

-Do you have any major life milestones coming up or taking place?

-Are you worried/anxious/stressed about something coming up?

If the answer is yes, back off of your training for a few days, while at the same time actively trying to reduce your stress by practicing mindset techniques, meditation, yoga, walks in the sunshine, reading fiction, etc. Anything that calms you down and gets you closer to realizing that you cannot control everything in your life.

2. Have you been going at it hard for 8-12 weeks?

-have you been consistently following a training plan with only 1-2 days off each week?

-are you not as excited as you first were when you started working out/this workout program?

If the answer is yes, it might be best to take a deload week, where you work out at 50-60% of your prior intensity, or a complete week off, where you focus on restorative moderate exercise such as walking and bodyweight exercises.

Lastly, it’s important to have a plan when taking a rest or backing off of training. The last thing we want to happen is for a week to inadvertently turn into a month or more! Figure out when you’re going to step back up your training, and what you’re going to do when that happens.

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When’s the last time you took a few days off of your regular training?