You are NOT enough.

Oooof that's harsh and completely untrue of course!

"I wanted to write the positive version of that sentence. But saying 'you are enough' reads like the caption under the Instagram picture of a cantily clad rich kid in their 20s, sitting in a meditation pose on a wooden deck in the jungles of Bali, beaming with the confidence of someone who’s never had to work a day in their life. #simplethings."

As corny as the phrase “you are enough is”, it does have a big interplay with training and more importantly the relevance of rest in training. 

When it comes to training we want to do as little as possible!

That’s a mind-blowing and uncomfortable concept. It’s so uncomfortable that I’m including a trigger warning for the final paragraph. Training only works through the following process: stimulus, recovery, and adaptation. We’ll discuss stimulus and adaptation and then finally look at recovery and why that piece is so hard for us.

Stimulus

Stimulus, in our context, is exercise. It is the most obvious part of the training cycle. You have to do stuff. You have to train. Training is the stimulus that asks your body to change—to grow stronger, become more flexible, and build endurance. Without this stimulus, you don’t have the impetus for change. Your body will happily stay in homeostasis.

For this stimulus to keep working, it must get progressively more intense. For example, you may start squatting with a 20lb kettlebell. As soon as your body adapts to that stimulus, you have to increase the intensity. Otherwise, your body will revert to homeostasis with no need for adaptation.

This is where most people get stuck. After their initial adaptation phase, the impetus is not intense enough. They add more volume by adding another workout during the week, but the intensity stays the same. So, we add more and take away from the time we need to adapt to the stimulus. More on that below, but just know that when you get to this stage, “your highs are too low and your lows are too high.”

Adaptation

The results of training are what we call adaptation. Apply the stimulus, and the body recovers stronger to adapt to that stimulus. Then apply a slightly bigger stimulus. Rinse and repeat this process until it stops working. Then completely change the stimulus.

This process of adaptation comes at a cost. It takes a metabolic toll on the body. Your body will use a lot of energy to recover—energy that can come from the calories in your food or from burning off cells deemed unnecessary. This is where it gets really tricky.

When you are trying to build strength, flexibility, or endurance, you are essentially asking the body to grow. For strength, the muscles have to grow stronger connections and learn how to develop force. To increase flexibility, you need to build control over ranges of motion that were previously unused. To build endurance, the organs involved in pumping blood and taking in oxygen must work hard. Essentially, we need to grow!

All this growth and adaptation take a toll, and we need time to pay that bill.

Energy/Recovery

All this growth takes an incredible amount of energy, but so does just being alive. The energy we use just to live—to breathe, digest food, maintain our immune systems, replace cells in the body, keep our skin strong, keep our hair thick, keep our mind functioning, and keep us productive—is expensive. In science, this is called your basic metabolic rate.

By adding more stimulus, we are adding another expense to the metabolic rate. We are adding this twofold: first, in the moment, to provide the energy to meet the demand; then, secondly, to supply the energy to adapt and recover from the demand.

Over time, your metabolic efficiency will improve. It will adapt and work harder to provide the energy needed to meet all these demands. To keep the loose personal finance analogy, it will get a massive raise.
This raise takes time, though! If you are always asking for more, there is never enough energy left over for adaptation to happen. Even worse, you will go into debt—a debt paid by reducing the amount of energy going to basic living functions.

Confused? You should be.

Trigger Warning: A Dark Turn

Your entire life, you have probably been told you are not doing enough, either subliminally or overtly. Within that message is the insidious interpretation that you are not enough. That is a horrible thing to face, and by staying busy and constantly moving, you can pretend to be doing something to fight this. But in reality, you are just adding fuel to the fire. The more you do, the more you feel like you need to do.

But more doesn’t mean better; it just means more.

What now becomes hard is rest. Sitting in the discomfort of presence. As absurd as it sounds, stillness, rest, or gentle movement allows you to build up the metabolic savings account. The account you need to draw on to grow and adapt

What To Do

First and foremost, do less but better!

When you work, work as hard as you can for that day. This may or may not be your hardest ever. It just means you do what you can for that day! For most of us, there is no way we can work at maximum intensity more than once a week and at 80% intensity more than three times a week. If you find yourself doing more than that, you’re not working that hard when you are working. Don’t worry; this takes time to build—years.

When the intention and effort match, you should be working at a level that requires rest.

Now we need to focus on rest. The king of all kings: sleep. When we sleep, our basic metabolic rate drops by 15-20%, so think of sleep as a giant sale on energy. Imagine you have the luxury of a private supermarket with the price discounts of Costco and the quality of a local farmers' market. You can’t afford to miss a single second of that sale!

Next, you need to develop better lows—true lows. If you are going high enough in your highs, you’ll understand these lows a lot better.

These lows are anything that allows you to relax and not feel like you should be doing something more. For me, I spend about 6 hours a week soaking in saunas and ice tubs. Professional athletes are often masters at video games. They work incredibly hard for two hours a day, eat mind-boggling amounts of food, then hit the couch.

For you, rest can be anything that allows you to feel peaceful without creating effort. It can be going for a walk, gentle explorative movement, hanging out with friends or family, a meditation class, spending time on a foam roller, or time with a book.

Over time, you will recognize what your body can do and needs from an intensity point of view. You will also build a bigger movement toolbox to allow you to meet those demands in the moment.

In the short term, give yourself a license—a license to do nothing. Be patient with yourself, understanding that adaptation takes time. Work as hard as possible when you do work, and then rest and recover, secure in the knowledge that you have done enough and, more importantly, are enough.