 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyke, and today we're going to ask the question, can you do too much exercise? So the short answer is yes. It depends on how much you're pushing yourself. I like to think that training is just like managing the stresses that are on your body. So waking up is a stress. Having sleep apnea is a stress. Getting sick is a stress. Having a bad time at your job is a stress. And we think about those things, and those are kind of like maybe not waking up, but everything else is like obviously kind of stressful, but exercise is a stressor as well. Now we don't look at exercise as a negative thing, but we tend to look at stress as a negative thing. And so what I want to do is just elucidate kind of the nuance of this argument here. So it's not that everything that is stressful is bad for you in the long term, but if you just kept exercising, perpetually, you would eventually die because you'd run out of energy and your muscle, your body would just shut down, right? So it's not always what you need to be doing. Now, can you do too much exercise? So there are different types of exercise, and that's kind of the biggest lesson of this. I might be able to go weight lift four times a week, but if I try to do that seven times a week every day of my life, I'm just not going to get the benefit from it because I'm not going to be able to recover from all of that stress. I'm going to be perpetually fatigued, and it's the same kind of idea with running. If you're training for a marathon, you absolutely have to run a lot to get prepared for it and to make sure that you're actually going to perform, but if you're really pushing yourself every single time you go for those runs, your body's just going to wear down. Your joints are going to wear down. It's probably going to interfere with your sleep. You're not going to see the benefits of the training because, again, it's just like that weight lifting example. You're always going to be in that super fatigued state. Now, this argument that we're making here, the seven days a week of working out is too much, is dependent on the intensity of your exercise. So if you are pushing yourself to the limit during your workouts, then doing a lot of them, yes, is too many. But if you plan in days where you're purposefully not pushing yourself to the brink, we might call them recovery days. And in a couple of days, I'm going to make a video about that one as well. It's a different type of stressor. It's not this, can I push myself to the end of fatigue kind of situation? It's, can I just move around a little bit? And so when I look at a workout that way, it's not quite as stressful and maybe even adds to my ability to deal with stress because I get to move around and I loosen up some of the joints in my body. Remember, like sitting is a stressor, not moving is a stressor. And so getting rid of that can kind of help me recover a little bit, help me actually deal with more stress. I think that, I mean, there are plenty of examples and hopefully I've given you some that kind of make you think about your life in general. But when you're looking at training, yeah, you can go too hard. The lesson is, don't push yourself further than your body can handle it. It's hard, it's easy to explain, but it's hard to do, right? So you're going to have to be kind of an experimentalist with your own training and with your own body, listen to what your body is telling you. And lastly, like, if you are, if you're supposed to do a hard workout, you don't necessarily have to do it, but I wouldn't just not work out because I think it's easy to kind of snowball into really bad habits where, you know, if I don't feel that good, I just won't go work out because it's not even worth it. That is not the case. That will never get you the optimal kinds of progression in your training and the optimal target of health that you're searching for. What you need to do is just say, okay, I understand I'm not feeling 100% today, but I'm going to go in and I'm just going to move around. I'm going to sweat a little bit. I'm going to elevate my heart rate. And when I leave, I'm going to feel a lot better than when I came in. And I think that is a much healthier way to think about training. So remember, don't put too much stress on your body. Put the right kinds of stress on your body. Yes, you can work out too much, but don't use that as an excuse to stop working out. Just tailor the intensity of your exercise to whatever state your body is ready for.