One of the toughest things to do as an athlete is take time off. You are passionate and love what you do, so to not do it seems counterintuitive. That being said, are you starting to feel a little jaded? Are your knees weak, and arms heavy? Struggling to get yourself started on a session or even into your kit? Work getting to you or are you irritated by things you'd usually let slide?
If so then it could be time to take some rest.
Ensure you bank the hard work and dedication you've put in over the past weeks or months and enable yourself to repeat the consistency you've shown you're able to manage.
It's now essential to take a break from all of that hard work. Break that routine. Especially if you've been pushing the limits of your efforts, it may become unsustainable over the next few months.
REST
Everyone takes rest differently. Whether it be a holiday, staycation, time off etc... You need to ensure that you remove yourself sufficiently from whatever you've been doing to make sure that you get the mental as well as physical rest necessary to recover and reinvigorate yourself to continue the next block of training.
If you don't do this sufficiently, you'll run out of steam and be unable to put your best efforts into the job at hand.
RECOVER
Taking time away from that job or training can allow both the mental and physical rest needed to recover. We as athletes put ourselves through a high amount of physical and mental stress, and without giving ourselves the opportunity to recover then we will run ourselves into the ground... quite literally, and get injured, or fed up.
REINVIGORATE
To do your job to the best of your ability you need to be passionate about it, enjoy it and want to do it day in day out.
So remove yourself completely. Make sure you miss it. Be ready to get back to it, be desperate to restart. As in order to be as consistent, dedicated and motivated all the way through until the next 'break' / holiday / rest period, you need to have a real desire to do it.
REFLECT AND REPEAT
Now, I can go into more detail about reflecting on your progress (or lack there of) in another post, but it's an important part of the process in order to do things better next time around. So what can you take from the last period that you'll instil in your future plans?
It's called 'black box thinking' a term coined by Matthew Syed maybe... either way something I've picked up from reading his book.
I do this more often than not. Essentially its origins are from the black boxes in aviation, their purpose being to decipher why a plane may have crashed to mitigate that in the future.
So, what did you do well, what did you do badly? How will you rectify this in the future... and then go and repeat what you've done so well... but better.
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