This last week, my legs have been achy and tired, mostly in my right quad and right hip.

My dad says it’s because I do full squats (well, they do work my legs more, true, which is a good thing–but he thinks I should be doing less-than-parallel squats. Safer, he says. Bleh!). I say it’s because I’m adding weight to the squat faster, and my legs aren’t adapting as fast as I want them to. I started with 20 lbs less than a month ago; I’m up to 60 lbs now. I’ve squatted much more than that before, so I’m mostly just annoyed that my body isn’t cooperating right now.

I dropped down to 40 lbs on Wednesday, to see if my leg still hurt. Oh, yeah. It even hurts when I walk really, really slowly on the treadmill. Grr. I tried Overhead Squats, where you hold the bar over your head and squat, and did them with just the bar (and when Krista says to start light, she is not kidding!). Yep, pain in right quad/hip. Aching in the quad, and a stinger in my hip. Meh! So, possibly, I’m bordering on overtraining, at least as far as that leg is concerned. (It could also come from a problem with my form, which would also not be good–and I can’t get my dad to check out my form, because he thinks it’s all wrong after I break parallel…)

Anyway, I picked up The New Rules of Lifting For Women: Lift Like A Man, Look Like A Goddess at Barnes & Noble earlier this week. Very much fun, and I wrote a review that will come out next week. They recommend taking an entire week off every once in a while, and since I want to do Alwyn’s plan next, I guess I’ll start following their advice now. Today I just played around with unweighted Overhead Squats again (they’re fun, so long as you don’t fall over) and a few of the exercises from NROLFW, to see what they felt like. I’m looking forward to starting that program next, but first I have to rest. Ugh.

Here’s to rest and recovery. In the meantime, I’m contemplating smatterings of things I’ve read in NROLFW and other training/lifting blogs: what are my goals when I left? How do I measure progress? (One of those things I usually try to avoid talking about…) And I have my work evaluation on Monday. Ugh.