Did you know that when you train you are causing an outside stress on your body? When you are in the gym you are increasing the stress load and when you are out of the gym you are doing all things possible to decrease that amount of stress. When you achieve the right balance training adaptation occurs. When you have TOO much stress, you get over-reaching, which could make you too fatigued to train hard enough to stimulate change. If you continue to keep training when stressed, go even further down the wrong track, you end up with over-training, which can lead to a near total system shut down.
No matter how you look at it, stress is stress. The body doesn’t differentiate between mental, emotional, or physical stress. So the last thing you should be doing if you’ve just had one of those days is head to the gym and max out. This seems counter-intuitive. When you have a bad day, it’s natural to want to take out that aggression in the gym and let off some steam. But when you do, you’ve essentially had what amounts to two max effort sessions in the same day, as far as your body is concerned.
To counteract all that stress you need training methods that soothe the body and allow your system to reset. For example, a day where you learn new moves should finish with an easy aerobic cool down to return the body to a suitable resting state that is responsive to training. Just as your warm up should prepare you for stress, your cool down should ready you to absorb the stress. And that is best done with a settled mind and body. Do a ROMWOD which is a stretching and mobility video that helps you recover from your workout while calming your mind.
Once you’ve got your recovery figured out, the final step is monitoring training intensity and frequency. Most people can’t handle more than two or three hard sessions per week, and the days between should be filled with active recovery to stimulate the system, not further deplete or stress it.
The goal of training is to improve the body, not test its limits. Focus on adding guided meditation and focused breathing work, as well as aerobic recoveries and cool downs, and you will be surprised at how much better your body feels.