Give your body what it needs

A 29-year-old national-level woman javelin thrower in the city died of a cardiac stroke while working out in a gym recently. It was her first day at the gym and reports suggest that she might have overshot her limits. Overexerting certain muscles or body parts for a period of time can lead to chronic injuries, also called overuse injury. Your body will tell you if you are overexerting yourself and paying attention to these signs is important, says fitness and wellness consultant Tripti Gupta. “Breathlessness, excess fatigue of muscles, inability to perform or workout normally, injury, muscle loss, dizziness, and faint spells are the most common signs of a tired body that could occur due to over-exercise or over exertion in the form of too much physical activity,” she says.

One has to feel good with a workout as exercise increases your metabolic rate for the next 24 hours, but if we are feeling low on energy, sleepy, dull and disinterested, there are chances that we have exhausted our body. “The moment you are over-trained, your muscles fail to recover on time, forcing you to live on supplements that will help you recover quickly. You only train intensively when you have got a good night rest and when you have the right nutrition to support it,” says celebrity holistic nutritionist Luke Coutinho.   

Prolonged erratic lifestyle with excessive workout can trigger an overload to the heart muscles causing strokes to even perfectly-fit-looking, young individuals, “Artificial supplements in the name of pre-workout meals need to come to a full stop so that one is able to even realise that the body is tired, one has to stick to as many natural foods and energy supply as much possible. One needs to wisely keep a tab on the number of hours you rest, work and workout. One hour of exercise maintaining a higher pulse rate than your normal daily pulse rate is good enough. More than this would lead to muscle loss, sugar cravings, dullness and overall fatigue,” Tripti warns.

The main tips would be to select the right kind of nutrition that is aligned to the exercise that you are doing. “Sometimes people doing a normal workout don’t really have the right ratio of carbohydrates, proteins and fats and that little normal exercise can be over-training for them. So you need to eat in accordance with your training, if you are going to train intensively, you need to properly check your meals,” Luke says.