Pacing isn’t just important in your physical training you need to pace your lifestyle as well. Everything in your life needs some sort of pace, but if you make it to fast you will quickly burn yourself out. You need to find a balance that lets you work hard but still gives you time to recover so that you’re not burning the candle at both ends, so to speak.
Firstly I want to talk about the importance of pacing with the frequency of your workouts and the exercises or training you do during a sessions.
How you pace, or how regularly you do your workouts can have huge affects on the results. If you train to frequently and you don’t give your body enough time to recover you can do some serious damage and increase your chance your injury, but if you do too few you may not get the results you’re after. So how do you work out what pace is best for you?
The answer is it’s different for everyone depending on your lifestyle. If you have a sedentary lifestyle you need to realize that your body recovers much slower then someone who works a more physically active job, and as a result you need to take in more recovery time. The harder your workout the more you’ll need to incorporate these recovery sessions into your schedule or you risk injury.
Although you may have a quicker recovery time working an active job you are also putting a lot more strain on your muscles, so more intense and frequent your workouts are the more you will need to stretch to stop your muscles from building up to many toxins.
Now onto the workout and exercises you do during a training sessions. The pace you set during a training sessions is directly related to the results you get from your training. The quicker the pace means it’s more intense which leads to a shorter workout that puts a lot more strain on your muscles. These kinds of workouts are ideal for people who play sport, or for sprinters, and require quick bursts of speed and energy.
On the other hand though you can slow the pace right down and this leads into your longer cardio sessions which are good for building up your endurance in longer events. This kind of training can last anywhere up to a few hours and is ideal for marathon runners or endurance racers.
You really need to decide on what you want out of your exercises before you start because how you set the pace will ultimately determine the results you get. For example you don’t want to set a fast paced workout if you are training for a marathon. It’s also important to mention that a slower paced workout can be performed much more frequently than a fast paced workout because the strain on your muscles is much lower, and they require less recovery time.
So in the end what you need to take from this is to make sure you plan out your training sessions and how frequently you do them and to what intensity they’re performed at. This will have a very large effect on your results. If you’d like to know more about pacing I suggest you consult your personal trainer as they will know what pace you need to be working at.