Joe Bauer is a fitness and weight loss expert with over 13 years of experience as a CrossFit coach and personal trainer. Joe’s known as AllAroundJoe on his blog. He was able to make some very interesting discoveries using
SweetBeatLife’s HRV for Training feature. Read below for his blog post and a link to the full podcast.
“When it comes to CrossFit it’s easy to get addicted. You start to see improvements, it’s fun, you see more improvements, you’re looking amazing, you see more improvements, you’re getting competitive, you see more improvements, you push even harder, you start to feel like crap.
You cannot figure out why you feel like crap. You’ve been eating great. Mostly Paleo, lots of calories.
You workout all the time. Sometimes up to 2 hours a day. You drink tons of water. You take all of the recommend supplements for muscle growth and recovery.
In order to start feeling better for your workouts you take pre-workout supplements loaded with caffeine, or drink coffee. It works for a little while, and you crush workouts.
What you don’t realized is that you are fatiguing your insides. You hormones are drowning.
Finally you hit a wall. You can’t sleep (or you can’t stay awake). Your energy levels just don’t feel right unless you’re jacked with caffeine.
And finally you’re workouts start to suffer. You can’t hit the numbers that you used to hit, and when you tell your body to push… it literally shuts down, and you can hardly move.
When you ask your coach they probably say to take some time off, and eat more.
You take a week off, and when you get back to CrossFit you feel better. Well, you feel better for a few days or weeks. It really depends on how many times you’ve gone through the overreaching cycle.
The problem is that every time you train you don’t fully recover.
Eventually your hormones can’t keep up. And in my case it was my adrenal glands.
These are the glands that are located on top of your kidneys, and produce that hormones that are responsible for your fight or flight (sympathetic), and rest & relax (parasympathetic) nervous systems.
In my case the fight or flight system became fatigued, causing all of the above symptoms.
The initial feeling of fatigue is what lead me to the Ben Greenfield podcast, and the SweetBeatLife iPhone app.
The SweetBeatLife app measures your Heart Rate Variability (HRV), and the power of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.
The coolest things is that the HRV can tell you how recovered your body is, and if it’s ready for another CrossFit workout. It will literally tell you to have an easy workout day, or even take the day off. It does this when you simply open the app and take your heart rate for 3 minutes in the morning.
The SweetBeatLife app is so beneficial that I’ve asked ALL of our competitive athletes at StoneWay CrossFit to start using it daily. If the app says to take the day off there’s no arguing.
We all want to get better, and we get better during rest from hard training.
I’ve always told people to listen to their bodies, but the real truth is that we can listen, but without tools like the SweetBeatLife app we have no idea what our bodies are saying.
In this episode you learn about CrossFit and overtraining, plus…
- The HRV tracking Sweet Beat Life app.
- Where to learn about HRV.
- What heart rate monitor that I’m using.
- And much more.
Resources and links mentioned in this podcast
Sweet Beat Life app for iPhone
60Beat Heart Rate Monitor
Ben Greenfield Fitness HRV/SweetBeatLife Podcast #1, #2, #3
Listening options
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Interesting article. Was in a similar boat. Used to push my workouts, get exhausted hours and days after, until I found out I had adrenal fatigue (had never heard of it before then). Thankfully, now in recovery. Yes, it’s a good idea to keep a check on these things, and as you said, keep monitoring the heart rate. Also easing into crossfit training is a good idea; http://healthyfittips.xyz/crossfit-beginner