DISCLAIMER: This ARTICLE IS BASED ON THE WRITERS’ PERSONAL EXPERIENCES. ALL SUGGESTIONS AND TIPS ARE HIS OPINION, AND SHOULD NOT BE USED TO TREAT OR DIAGNOSE ANY CONDITION. PLEASE CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN TO ASSESS YOUR INDIVIDUAL HEALTHCARE NEEDS, AS THE RELATE TO RETURNING TO YOUR RESPECTIVE ACTIVITY.
After the release of the original article (If by the way, you haven’t checked out please do so now!) many of you reached out and wanted me to give you guys specifics. What did I do personally after my ordeal with the big bad C word! Now, I originally didn’t want to get too specific as I felt that I would be making the entire piece just about myself. However, based off of your feedback I quickly realized that most of you actually need the story AND the specifics. So who am I to rob you of that information, HaHa!
That being said, I am however going to simplify this a bit in hope that it will be far more easily understood and consequently more easily implemented in your own lives. So what will we be covering in this second edition of how to bounce back?
Well, first of all we will have a quick recap of the most important factors in the previous article. And then we will turn our attention to my personal journey, plan and how I balanced everything from learning how to walk again, retraining my lung capacity all the way to getting on the treadmill and running again.
So if that sounds like something you would be interested in; stick around because it is about to get very very interesting!
Let’s recap what we discussed in the previous article…
When it comes to fitness, we all know that no matter how consistent we want to be, life just happens. And most of the time it’s out of your control. I mean you could fall ill for a few weeks, or in my case fall seriously ill and be out for a few months! You could get hurt or injured and be forced to take an unscheduled leave of absence from fitness. Your career, school or personal life might need some serious attention causing you to prioritize the things that truly matter in life.
Regardless of your specific situation, we’ve all found ourselves at the point where we need to bounce back, start over and to be honest; it kind of sucks!
Luckily, I used my personal ordeal with the dreaded VID, as an experiment. A sort of path of self discovery, a way to find out what I am truly made of. I made the mistakes, found out what works and doesn’t work and ultimately took the time to create a pseudo blueprint for you guys to use and implement in your own lives.
We did cover quite a bit in the previous article, and if you haven’t read it by now guys and girls… What are you still doing here! Okay, let’s make it easier for everyone, here is the link and go have yourself a read, trust me it’s worth it!
Anyway here are the main lessons from the previous article:
Lesson #1: You’re not alone; being in this position you can’t help but compare. You will find yourself comparing your previous abilities, physical stats and aesthetics with your current situation. You will find yourself comparing where you are now with where some of your friends and family or colleagues might be. You might be asking yourself why is this happening to me? But that’s a victim mentality. Stop this, right now.
We have all been where you are now, you are not alone and you will get through this, I promise.
Lesson #2: Develop a habit or rather unlearn the bad habits and relearn the good ones. This might seem straightforward but it really isn’t, we all know that when something becomes a habit it is far easier to implement it on a consistent basis. Now, being away from fitness for an extended period of time you’ve probably, sometimes unconsciously, developed new “bad” habits at the expense of positive and solid habits. This is something you will actively need to change, if you want to maintain any form of consistency.
Lesson #3: Be patient and pace yourself, this can be a very difficult concept for most people to practice as we all know that we live in a world of instant gratification. But trust me when I say, when it comes to your fitness there is no quick fix. There is no magic pill or secret workout that will get you back on track in just 10 days or something ridiculous. Despite what all the social media experts might have you believe, the truth is that you will need to assess your current abilities and be realistic about how long it will take you to make any form of meaningful change to said abilities. Also, being impatient in this situation is a dangerous game with multiple red flags and risk factors that accompany it. But more on this in our previous article.
Lesson #4: Goal setting, be honest, specific and realistic about your goals. Goal setting is such a powerful tool, yet it can also be your unintentional achilles heel. If you set a goal that’s unrealistic and way out of reach the chances of you following through and successfully attaining said goal is almost zero. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I am simply speaking from a probability perspective. The flipside of the coin is that if you set a goal that is too easy, you run the risk of not working hard enough which could impact your overall results at the end of the day. So the idea here is to set a goal that requires you to work hard consistently but that is also realistic in the sense that it’s something you could achieve because of that hard work.
Lesson #5: Have a plan, and by plan we specifically mean looking at your nutrition and your training. As we all know that once we take an extended break from our respective fitness journeys’ there is a tendency to throw caution to the wind particularly when it comes to our diet. Having a plan or strategy on how to get back on track can prove vital in our attempts to successfully bounce back into our fitness regime.
So as you can see there is a certain method to my madness, but the next parts of this article will discuss my personal experience in a bit more detail.
It’s story time! My fight, my struggle, my redemption.
Since you guys were kind enough to check out our previous article, you will by now know that this entire concept stemmed from my personal battle with the dreaded VID’. Now I am not going to get into all the detail regarding my hospitalization etc, instead I am going to focus on my physical battle with the disease. What my body went through and ultimately what I needed to do to get back on track and bounce back in my fitness journey.
But I do believe before we get into that part we need a little bit of context first. Before I fell ill I was at the peak of my physical capacity for the first time in many years. This is because I spent the previous 12 months rebuilding myself; rehabilitating old injuries, working on my mobility and flexibility all while consistently training at a very high level. I was strong, fit and quite lean. My stats were roughly 84kg in weight and between 11-13% body fat.
That being said, when I was discharged from the hospital I had lost about 10kgs of body weight in about 10 days, I had permanent lung damage and I literally couldn’t walk by myself.
Are you starting to see the picture? The reason this battle to get back to full fitness was so daunting was simply because of all the trauma my body had gone through in a very very short period of time. The implications and stress that my body needed to endure resulted in my journey back was a constant uphill battle. But don’t sweat, we did it and so can you.
Now I understand that your situation might not have been this drastic or maybe it was even worse than what I went through, I have empathy for that, I really do. I am basically just sharing this as a form of inspiration that no matter the circumstance, if you persevere, you will be successful in the end.
In my case I had two big obstacles to overcome: