My body, primarily in my legs, is exhausted today. I had been working out pretty regularly at 5 days a week for 2 hours or more each day before taking vacation in Mexico. When I came back I was pretty busy, so I wasn't getting to the gym as much, but I was still active. On top of this, softball season has started and I managed to get into tournaments right off the bat.

Last weekend was my second weekend in a row when I played in a tournament. First tournament was one day, 4 game guarantee. It beat me up a bit. Left me dehydrated and legs tight for a couple of days. Last weekend was a 6 game guarantee over 2 days. My team played 7, I played 6 of them over the course of the two days. My feet, hamstrings and knees are dying right now.

I am by no means in bad shape. In fact, I still jogged a 15-minute two mile warm up to start my last workout. Usually my gauge for the shape I'm in is off of how winded (or not) I am after my warm up run. I felt great. But running over the weekend reminded me of a simple unavoidable fact in fitness. The human body is an extremely efficient machine.

What I mean is that your body conditions itself in repetition to meet the needs of it's use in the most efficient ways possible. If you bench press 100 pounds every day for 4 months, it will build muscle in a way that will use the least amount of energy possible to due so with the least amount of damage to the muscle. All physical activity works the same way. For example, I have had years where I was running for an hour a day before lifting weights. Then when winter would roll around, I would be winded after just 40 minutes of snowboarding. 40 minutes of letting gravity work on me and I'd feel like a fat kid chasing a twinkie on a string.

This is what happened these last two weekends. I had been staying "in shape" and been running regularly. In fact, 2 months ago I actually increased my cardio to cut extra fat and bulk muscle, work on my run speed and get my breathing better. However, come softball season, 6 straight games of running bases and the outfield jest destroyed me. This is because the best training for any activity is that activity. No matter what kind of cardio I did -- invervals, distance, sprints -- it wasn't the same as playing a game, let alone 6 of them.

This is the plateau. The best thing for my workout routine right now was breaking it up with softball. My legs were working harder and my metabolism shot through the roof.

My mistakes? It's softball, I got myself dehydrated. I drank beer over the weekend and didn't take in nearly enough water. To top that off, I had caffeine before my morning games to wake up. What did I do right? I made sure I got lots of good proteins and carbs before during and after all my games.

Moral of the story? Mix it up. When you hit a plateau or your body's in a rut, find something new.