Rest Week...

It’s been almost a year (last March) since I took five consecutive days off. Zero training from today until Friday. My body is junk and I need the rest. Hopefully my aches, pains and tendonitis improves this week!
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Guilty as charged: A stimulus addict is someone who fell in love with the actual act of training and using his muscles not so much for the gains but for the feeling and sensation derived from the workout itself. For these guys and gals, the training itself is its own reward. Being a stimulus addict has its pros. You'll rarely lose motivation to train, you'll stick to it over the long run, and you'll never frown upon hard work.

However, you are the perfect candidate to train excessively, pushing yourself too hard, for too long, too often. A stimulus addict often prides himself on working harder than everybody else instead of getting better results than everybody else. As such, a stimulus addict is likely to become his own worst enemy – engaging in training practices that lead to stagnation (or even regression) and feeling like crap all the time”. - T Nation

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The hardest (for me at least) - and one of the most important - things about training is recovery. “I’ve said this before: you don’t get big and strong from lifting weights – you get big and strong by recovering from lifting weights. And this entails more sleep and more food than the vast majority of you people seem to understand.

If you’re going to grow, you have to train hard and recover from that training. You have to understand why growing is important, why recovery is important, and how to do it correctly. You have to understand that it may even be the most difficult part of the program for you, perhaps physically or perhaps even psychologically – maybe harder than the training itself. If it is sufficiently important, you’ll figure out a way to deal with it. And that’s how you distinguish yourself from the rest of the gym – the guys who can’t, or won’t achieve the goal they have set for themselves”. - Mark Rippetoe