Doing nothing: The reason why it is often the best option.

Something that I have heard from many trainers and physiotherapists is that, to be well exercised, rest is as important as doing all your exercises. Whenever I hear that I say "Then why am I not bigger? I have rested all my life." No of course not, just kidding. But being serious, they are right. What they are referring to is that it is not only about exercising and waiting for your muscles to grow, it is also about giving them adequate rest, getting a good night's sleep, etc. Ultimately, it's not just about what you do, but also what you don't do. To be successful, you must not only do certain things, you must also avoid doing others. People always say things like that Arnold trained up to five hours a day to be so big, but no one says that after exercising, each of his muscles would rest more than forty hours until his next session. Yes, he trained that amount of time every day, but every day he trained different muscles because he had to rest the muscles in his body long enough for them to grow. Without rest, there is no growth.

Rest is very important, since you cannot do something intensely for a long time without resting. If you do something for very long periods of time, chances are that you do it at a lower intensity range because you can't give one hundred percent of yourself one hundred percent of the time, that's impossible. That's why we sleep. People today have this idea of productivity in mind, they believe that they can be productive for eight hours a day, five days a week, for dozens of weeks a year. That's impossible. Not even Arnold worked that hard on his muscles. Again, rest is important, sometimes it is important to do nothing, because sometimes the only option is either to do nothing or to do things wrong, and it is always better to do nothing than to do it wrong. I even think that many times doing nothing can be classified as something that is done, and as the best thing to do.

Again, that's why we sleep, that's why sleep is necessary. It is said that it is advisable to sleep eight hours a day, do you know how much that is? If we sleep eight hours we are sleeping a third of the day, that means that a third of all our time, of all our life, we spend sleeping. Of course, if we follow the recommendations. Think about this, that means if you are at least 30 years old, you have literally spent 10 of those years in your bed. And you know what's funny? That even if you sleep that many hours, you won't have enough energy to live the rest of your hours intensely. You need to rest even awake. At some point you may feel that time is not enough, but that will only happen if you try to push yourself to do an excessive amount of things that you are not capable of doing.

The modern world has a very hectic and busy lifestyle that demands a superhuman amount of energy. It is not only work, it is everything, like everything, many people are always pushing themselves to do more, and even many times more is not enough. I think it is very important that we learn to do nothing, it is very very important. Sometimes I have realized that many people find it more difficult to do nothing than to do something, contrary to what one might think. Even many people prefer to do the wrong thing before doing nothing, it is as if we are afraid of omission. I think we have been taught that we must do something all the time, and therefore sometimes we feel pressure to do anything that we cannot even rest. In general, I think that a lot of times a good advice would be that doing nothing is the best thing to do. Sometimes you have to let the mud settle for the water clears.

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