Will exercise make me tired?

“I would love to exercise but I just can’t afford to be tired during the day.”  If you have used this excuse to put off starting a workout program, well, this is your lucky or unlucky day, depending on whether you were hoping that excuse would work.  Read on to find out why regular, healthy levels of exercise will not only not make you tired, but help you to have more energy.

There are some very real reasons why exercise might actually be causing you to have energy lulls throughout the day and so let’s first address that.  In many cases, it is not the exercise but the other aspects of your life that are leaving you less than alert.

Medical reasons may be why you are finding yourself tired.  Always visit a doctor before starting a new workout plan and if you find that in the course of your new program, you are exhausted, revisit your doctor for further advising.  If there are no medical reasons for the fatigue, you may not be getting enough sleep each night, your nutrition may be poor, or you may be overtraining.

Napolean said, “Men need 6 hours, women need 7 and fools need 8”.  More recent experts dispute Napolean’s statement and feel the average adult needs 8 hours of undisturbed sleep. A good indicator is if you wake up feeling rested and are able to stay alert during the day.  Not getting enough sleep may be the reason for your fatigue, not the exercise.

Nutrition weighs in as another major reason for the sluggishness many of you may feel each day.  Take care to each a healthy variety of foods with only small amount of fats and sugars.  Caffeine taken too late in the day may cause you to have unsettled sleep, setting you up for a tired day after.  Limit your caffeine intake to breakfast and lunch.  Immediately following a workout, within 30 minutes, it is best to eat something with some complex carbohydrates and protein.  This will help to replace the glycogen in the muscles which in turn helps the body to maintain its energy level.

Finally, overtraining or training too much can cause you to have the opposite effect of regular exercise.  Intense training makes you weak, rest makes you strong. That may be an oversimplification, but the theory is accurate.  The most common symptom of overtraining is fatigue.  When you push the cardio and muscular systems to failure, they reach a point where one night of rest is no longer enough for recovery.  You need to have periods of work and rest to maintain a healthy balance.

There you have it, the top reasons you might be unusually tired during the day.  None of them were regular, healthy workouts.

Exercise, if done properly, will not leave you feeling exhausted, but instead will help energize your body.  A by product of regular cardiovascular exercise is a stronger, larger heart.  By increasing the size of the heart, you increase the efficiency of the heart. This means it pumps more blood through your body with less effort. It takes energy to pump all that blood through you; specifically 7500 liters of blood per day. 

Regular workouts have also been shown to reduce tension, anger, depression, anxiety and fatigue.  This is a result of the hormones released into the bloodstream during periods of exercise. In simple terms, you feel these positive effects to the emotions because when the beta hormones are released, they block the pain signals going to the nerves thus leaving you feeling “no pain”.  This analgesic effect on the body results in euphoria.

Some basic rules of thumb you may have already surmised:

Consult a physician
Start out on your new program slowly
Eat well
Get adequate amounts of good sleep
And…
Keep a positive attitude

By Christina Leon, Staff Writer