Working through the pain is a stupid idea

This is a diet update for September 2016.

I was doing my morning exercise routine and something happened. My left calf developed a sharp pain during a jumping jack set.

I stopped exercising, waited a minute, tried another jumping jack and nope... not happening. That pain was not going away. What happened to me is commonly known as calf strain; a tear in the muscle fibres.

There are 3 grades of calf strain with 1 being minor and 3 being pain so bad you can't walk. Mine was a solid 2. No bruising, but still painful.

The cure for this strain? Let the tear heal naturally, don't exercise and don't walk too much. And yes, walking is painful when you have calf strain.

I stopped exercising for a whole week, kept my walking to a minimum and at the time I write this I'm almost back to 100% and have started exercising again.

The reason I talking about this is because there are some idiots out there who subscribe to the "no pain, no gain" way of doing things, and wow what a stupid statement that is.

When my body says STOP, I stop to let the healing process begin, because if I don't stop and "work through the pain", that only causes more pain and possibly permanent injury.

This is not the first time I've had injury due to exercise. The last time it happened, it was right after my treadmill busted and I was doing the running-in-place thing as a replacement exercise. At first I was fine, but my right leg started complaining, so I stopped, let it heal, then switched over to a different set of exercises.

Why did my left calf get a strain? It was because I switched to doing jumping jacks in bare feet. This is something my calf wasn't used to, so I stopped doing that and went back to how I was doing them before.

What I did not know before but know now is that you can't just suddenly go barefoot when it comes to exercise. Whether it's jumping jacks, jogging, walking or running, you have to slowly transition yourself into it, else you get injured. My feet are used to shoes and not being bare, so if I decide to try exercising in bare feet again, I have to be a lot more gentle about it. Lesson learned.

Weight update

On my last weigh-in, the scale said 152.4 pounds, so I'm still doing okay with a BMI of 22.51.

I've kept the weight off and that's what matters. And during the week I didn't exercise, I cut the calories down to compensate.

Yes, I still count calories because it does work and keeps my weight in check.

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