Becoming Virtuosa with Dr. Susan Crockett | Resting While Running: Master the Art of Active Recovery

Episode #113:

Resting While Running: Master the Art of Active Recovery

Are you constantly running around, especially during the busy holiday season? As women, we often find ourselves juggling multiple roles and responsibilities, leaving little time for rest and recovery. But what if I told you that it’s possible to find moments of respite even in the midst of the chaos?

In this episode, I introduce the concept of resting while running. This is a skill I learned during my time as a triathlete. Just as runners slow their pace after a hill climb or swimmers tread water to catch their breath, we too can find ways to actively recover without completely stopping our forward momentum.

Tune in this week to discover how to take care of yourself while still getting things done. I share practical tips for incorporating active recovery into your daily life, from eating nourishing foods to making time for meditation and self-reflection, and you’ll learn how to show up as your best self, whatever life throws your way.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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How to apply the concept of resting while running to your daily life as a busy woman.

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Why active recovery is crucial for post-surgery patients and how it relates to our everyday lives.

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The importance of fueling your body with whole, plant-based foods during stressful times.

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How to honor your body’s need for rest without completely stopping your forward momentum.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Come find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show and subscribe today.

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Ep #82: What Is a MIGS & Why Is It Important to You?

TRANSCRIPT

Do whatever it takes for you to have your quiet time where you can think about what's important for you spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and to prioritize what you need to do with your day.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Hey y'all, welcome to the Dr. Crockett show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. And we are two days after Thanksgiving here in the United States. If you're joining us from overseas and we are heading very fast into the Christmas season, it seems like we are in an energy of hurry and scurry.

And so today's episode is an episode that I just wanted to have a little chat with you about what it looks like to have an active recovery. We're calling it resting while running because all of us are running around. And I thought that this is kind of a new concept. I haven't heard other people talk about it, but I wanted to kind of set the stage.

So as busy mothers and women and wives and professionals, we are in a season where a lot of us have just spent a tremendous amount of effort cooking a huge traditional family Thanksgiving meal. It's been a time when we've had kids coming home from college, family coming in from out of town, extended visitors. I mean, it's been hectic and all of that can just feel a little bit exhausting. And there's a lot riding on us when we're the ones being the hostesses and running around and doing all of that.

And also I'm in the middle of ramping up my practice, my business. So I'm running in a very high growth, high ramping up phase. And I know that we'll get to the next level within the next two to three months because of how we've done our business planning and pro forma. And that doesn't help the fact that we're still in a very busy running mode.

And when you're just starting to turn the wheel on something, as we say, or you're starting to push the boulder up a hill, it's getting it going. That's the hardest thing. And so there's an important skill here that I want to share with you that I do when I'm in that mode of having to run and having to carry the load, and it's called resting while running.

And I thought of this idea because of my background as a triathlete. Yeah, I used to do triathlons. I'd like to get back into that kind of shape, but I'm not there right yet.

But there's this skill that I learned when I was working with a running coach on my running because I grew up swimming and fairly good cyclist. I've done some long distance cycling, but I really was not a great runner. And so when I decided to do triathlon, I hired a coach and she would come to my house and bang on my door at 4:30 in the morning, make me get up and go for a run. But she taught me this concept of recuperating while you're running without stopping. And that has been really useful to me for a lot of things.

It's similar to an active recovery that we do after surgery. So we're going to talk about how these are similar and how we can apply some of these skills to our lives and our lifestyle as we are in this very busy running season of our lives.

Now that's not to say that if you are really at a point when you need to rest, that you shouldn't go lay down and take a nap, please. If you're tired, listen to your body and take a nap. If you need a vacation, take your vacation. I'm not talking to those people who are at that point. I'm talking to the rest of us who need to figure out a way to do some recuperation while we're still going, while we're still moving.

So the concept of resting while running is something like this. We would run up a hill and our heart rate would get very fast and I would get really tired and we would get to the top of the hill and we would take a slower pace. We would slow it down to a jogging pace or even a walking pace, but we wouldn't just stop. We wouldn't run up the hill and do that high impact or high intensity training, that HIIT training, and then just stop at the top of the hill. Because for one, if you're a runner, you know that you would just cramp up horribly. And second, you would probably not want to get up off the ground again once you sat down.

So runners learn how to do this thing where they just slow down and, but they keep moving and that's still very valuable mileage that they're getting. It's not as fast as when they're doing high intensity, high speed running, but it's just as valuable because it allows the body's heart rate to come back down and to recover and to keep on pace and to keep the momentum and the body moving without it just shutting down

Same thing happens with swimmers, right? What is the equivalent in swimming? Well, it's treading water. So when we were little kids, I used to take these classes at the YMCA and we would learn safety and how to be lifeguards. And one of the things we had to do was learn how to tread water or float for a very long time where you don't just get out of the water and sit on the side. You have to learn how to recover while you're actively still dealing with the water and the forces around you and be able to rest and breathe and get your heart rate back down again.

And then what's the equivalent on cycling? Well, if you're a cyclist, you know that one of the joys of cycling is gliding down a hill and just resting as you're gliding and flying the glorious bike ride. That's just, yeah, it's amazing. It's flying. It makes me so happy.

So how does this equate to when we do surgery? So I am a surgeon, I'm a board certified OBGYN and I specialize in women's surgery and robotic surgery. I'm a MIG surgeon. And There's a whole episode about what are MIG surgeons and why should you care? That's tacked to the top of our YouTube channel if you're interested in that.

So my whole goal with my practice is to make surgery easier for women. And one of the things that we do when we're making surgery easier for women is we teach them about active recovery. So we do small incision, mostly same day surgery for things like hysterectomies and endometriosis, fibroids, ovarian tumors, sterilizations, pelvic prolapse, all kinds of stuff like that.

And since most of my patients are small incision surgery and we use some long-acting numbing medicines in our incisions, we believe that minimally invasive for a patient means not only do we do small incision robotic surgery, but we also are minimally invasive into their regular life, which means when they wake up from surgery, we don't want them just laying in bed for five days recovering. That's actually more detrimental to them than doing what we recommend, which is an active recovery.

So if you take a patient and you just put them in bed for three to five days, there are a couple bad things that happen. One is they end up with a higher incidence of lung problems called atelectasis, which is when they're not taking really deep breaths and their lungs kind of get like a wet sponge in the bases. They have an increased risk for blood clots in the legs called DVTs or in the lungs called PEs, and that's from the immobilization.

They'll also feel worse because they'll be stiff and they'll lay in bed and then the stiffness from surgery will be added on on top of that and they'll also increase their risk of constipation and in surgery we really don't want people straining because that risks the incisions not healing well.

So instead of just having our patients in bed recovering, we ask that if they're tired and want to go to bed and sleep, they can go to bed and sleep. But if they're awake, we want them up in a chair in the living room. And we instruct their family members that they're not allowed to bring them anything in the chair because we want the patient to get up very gently about every hour and do a good little stretch, just get the stiffness out.

We want them to get up and move their legs, get up to sit at the table to eat, get up to go to the bathroom, get up to get their water, take a little stroll outside. But there's a balance here. We don't want them just laying in bed, not moving, but we also don't want them overdoing it.

So for the first week, we don't want them doing laps around the block or exercise or housework or bending or doing any heavy work at all. So this concept of resting while recovering or resting while running or doing active recovery is this little gentle balance.

How do we apply that to our lives when we are busy running around for the holidays taking care of everything or busy building a practice or busy building yourself or changing yourself. How do we apply this? So active recovery in our life means that we acknowledge that we all need rest and sometimes we need a little bit more rest than normal.

I also have a strong history of seasonal affective disorder, which is that little tinge of depression that happens where basically my body just wants to hibernate when the days start getting shorter. And I've been like that for a kid. So I know that about me, which means I know that I just go to bed earlier and I sleep longer and I honor that and rest and recover. But am I just sitting on the couch not working? No, I still get up and go to work. I still take care of the things that need to get done. If I get to the end of the day and I need to modify my activities to take care of myself, I do that.

I make time to exercise. I make time to feed myself whole foods. We teach whole food plant based diet on the show, which means eating your fresh veggies, fruits, seeds, nuts and beans. If you don't want to go total vegan on that, we can also throw in some lean proteins. We really recommend fish and lean chicken proteins and staying away from red meat. If you have any kind of inflammation or cardiac disease, we want to limit our animal products.

So how do we honor ourselves in real life? We just don't feed ourselves all the comfort food. We may have the mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving, but starting the very next day, we start back to fueling our body with healthy fuel and having time for ourselves to meditate and to think and give consideration and slow down the pace of life. Do whatever it takes for you to have your quiet time where you can think about what's important for you spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and to prioritize what you need to do with your day.

So here's to all of us that are busy working mothers and business owners and helpers and teachers and everything else that we do as women, I'm hoping this helps you to get a little bit of perspective on resting while you're running this holiday season and make sure to take the time out for yourself and treat yourself right. And that doesn't mean eating sugar and bonbons and cake and pie. It means eating the healthy foods that you need and getting the rest that you need.

Thank you for joining me on The Dr. Crockett Show. I look forward to seeing you next week. We're going to start a series about choosing our protocols. And that's a little different than choosing New Year's resolutions. This is about forming healthy habits and consciously making decisions about how we want to be in the upcoming year.

Our podcast is called Becoming Virtuosa. A lot of you are listening to us via the podcast and I appreciate you tuning in, but the name of that show means becoming the best feminine version of yourself. So we're going to be doing a launching an eight-part series on how to think about making the choices that you need to become the best version of yourself in 2025.

I look forward to seeing you all next week. Love you. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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