the difference between pushing yourself and overexerting yourself physically.
In: Biology
Tl;dr – if your body can recover from it on its own, it’s pushing yourself. If it causes permanent damage, it’s over-exerting yourself.
Your body is like a car, and it needs gas to work. This why you have to eat food. Unlike a car, it can be hard to tell exactly how much gas is in the tank. It can also be hard to tell how much gas you need for a day because things can change so fast.
That’s why your body has a special backup battery. It’s called your liver! Your liver stores this special backup fuel called glycogen. When there is not enough fuel in your blood, your liver starts giving off this fuel. This fuel is good, but, it’s usually used for just your brain. If your whole body needs it, you feel very crummy and tired.
Sometimes people will feel crummy, but won’t listen to their body. They don’t rest and refuel to regular tank or the backup. This is usually because they want to lose weight, so they run on empty for a very long time.
This can lead to the body getting confused. It will release lots of insulin all the time because it’s scared and thinks it needs to break down food super fast. The body thinks “I might not get enough fuel later so I have to use all of this right now!!” This panicked condition is for life and they will have to eat every 4-6 hours to keep their body healthy.
Here’s another way people can overdo it.
Muscle is actually a bunch of very thin threads bundled together. When a bodybuilder wants to make her muscles bigger, she lifts weights. The strain will make teensy tiny tears in the threads, which is okay because her body should be able to repair it as easily as a small cut.
But, if she pushes herself too much and damages her muscles a lot, her body might not be able to repair the muscles in time for the next session. The injuries can stack up very quickly. Or maybe she strains herself all at once and makes one very big tear.
Or, she might be taking it easy, but if she isn’t eating right, then her body doesn’t have the tools it needs to make the repairs. The little tears start to add up and soon she will be in a lot of pain. The injury might be too much for her body to heal and she will need to see a doctor.
Pushing yourself is when your body can recover on its own, like refueling the backup tank or letting tiny tears heal. Over-exerting yourself is when you hurt yourself so much it does not heal right on its own.
Its a little muddy since those aren’t precise terms. But I would argue that it becomes “overexertion” when you exceed your limits on an exercise and cause injury. Its the difference between waking up with very sore muscles vs damaging your tendons by over lifting.
Honestly the easiest way for me is to calculate what your optimal exercise heart rate and your maximum heart rate. Then use an Apple Watch of whatever to exercise and stay within the most effective heart rate range
Overexerting in looser sense means to the point of no return. As long you can recover in “reasonable” time there is no difference
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