On this second episode, we’ll be going over three strategies you can use to help you listen to your body so that you don’t overdo it on your next theme park vacation and end up hitting the wall.

This includes covering the light system, distinguishing pain from muscle soreness, and then how you can rate your muscle soreness and adjust your day accordingly.

All right, here. We. Go.

Listening to Your Body

It’s something that you hear from just about anyone nowadays from your friend to a personal trainer, to physical therapist, to even another health care professional.

But what it exactly doesn’t mean?

And to be fair, it’s not necessarily an intuitive skill. It requires effort. It requires a lot of awareness of your own body.

But most of all, it takes time.

But once you do learn how to properly listen to your body, you can use that skill that you can develop and figure out whether or not, you know, you can spend more time at the parks and make it towards the fireworks at the end of the day, or if you need to take a couple extra of breaks in the middle of the day, or if you need to take a longer rest break and go back to the hotel and take a nap.

But it really helps you figure out your theme park day, so that way you can have less pain at the end of your trip.

The Light System

So, first thing we’re going to talk about is what’s called the light system.

It’s a really easy, really simple way to visualize and utilize to help you listen to your body.

So each light on the light system, just like a signal light at an intersection, defines how much activity your body can handle, and then how much you should expect to do later on.

So if you’re in the green, that means, for example, let’s say you did a day at Magic Kingdom, the next day you wake up, you’re in the green, you feel no soreness, no discomfort. That means, okay, that next day that you wake up, you can keep going, do another theme park day, maybe you can even do a little bit more in terms of step count.

Now, if you wake up the next day and you’re feeling some soreness, some discomfort, but to you, it’s acceptable, it’s something that you can work through.

You can still have that theme park day, but maybe take a couple of extra rest breaks throughout the day, that way you don’t overdo it. Or you can go through the day and watch how many steps you’re taking and just decrease the amount of steps you’re doing relative to your previous theme park day.

Now, if you’re following the light system and you’ve physically prepared your body to handle the Disney theme parks, my hope is you don’t fall into the red zone, which means you wake up that next day, you’ve got unbearable pain or soreness where you can’t, you know, you’re taking a few steps and you’re like, oh man, I really feel it today.

This means you either need to take way more frequent rest days throughout the day, or you should probably consider, you know, taking a day off from the theme parks, take some sort of active rest break, spends more time at the pool, chilling and relaxing.

So that’s the light system.

Again, it’s a great way to gauge how you feel it because it puts you into three distinct categories. It’s really simple. It’s easy to implement.

Now there are two ways you can use that light system.

The first way is what I described when we were going over this system.

You can utilize it in a way where you go through a theme park day, you wake up the next day, and you determine whether or not you could go through that theme park day without worrying about, you know, having to take extra rest breaks or whether or not you need to take more rest breaks. So you can gauge how you feel at the day after a theme park day.

You can also use it on the same day that you’re at the theme park.

So for example, you’re at the theme parks, you can gauge how you’re feeling and then determine, okay, am I in the green light? I can keep going, I can keep going towards the end of the day and keep walking.

Or in the middle of the day, you know, you’re feeling some soreness already, you’re feeling it a little bit in your feet, the feet are starting to get a little achy. Okay, maybe we should take a couple of rest breaks, sit down, let the feet rest for a little bit.

Pain Versus Muscle Soreness

Muscle soreness is the result of doing an activity at a level that your body isn’t quite used to.

Usually muscle soreness is felt right over the meaty part of your body, as opposed to the harder parts of your body, the more bony areas. Muscle soreness can also be known as delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS. This is trainable and easily reversible as long as you give enough time for your body to recover from it.

What that means is usually after a certain level of activity, if you give enough time for your body to rest, usually that’s between 24 and 72 hours, that same amount of activity that you originally did would not bring about that same level of soreness.

Your body develops the resiliency to be able to handle that level of activity. Again, it’s easily reversible.

It’s nothing to worry about as long as you rest for the right amount of time. But if you do not give yourself the right amount of time, to rest, say, for example, if you walk 25,000 steps at Magic Kingdom one day, you feel some muscle soreness the next day.

If you don’t give yourself enough time to rest, or if you don’t take enough rest breaks throughout the day, that amount of stress on the muscles compounds towards the next day. And if you do it again, it’ll compound on the next day, and then it’ll add up to where it takes longer and longer for your body to fully recover.

Now, let’s talk about the difference between that muscle soreness from pain and discomfort.

So pain, discomfort, I’m going to put that in the same box here, but that’s more intense, it’s more constant. Instead of feeling that muscle soreness on the more meaty part of your body, usually it’s felt more at the joints, the more bony parts of your body.

It’s usually described as like a deep ache or sometimes even a sharp pain. It’ll go away with some rest, but the difference between that pain and discomfort from muscle soreness is once it does go away, it usually comes back once you do that same level of activity, right?

So it’s not trainable. It’s something that keeps coming back. If you don’t get it properly treated by usually a health care professional.

So if that’s something that you’re dealing with, highly recommend that you reach out to a trusted health care professional, a trusted physical therapist and get that addressed properly.

How Muscle Soreness Affects Your Daily Routine

OK, finally, muscle soreness, how you can use it and rate it depending on how it affects your day to day routine.

So this final topic combines the idea of muscle soreness with the light system that we talked about earlier.

So if you take a day at Magic Kingdom and then the next day you wake up and you’re having no difficulty getting up, walking around, going down the stairs to go get to the bus, to get to the theme parks, that is equivalent to the green light, like we talked about earlier. You feel fine, no muscle soreness, you can go about your day not worrying about how much walking you’ll be doing.

If you wake up and you’re feeling some muscle soreness that makes it, you could still go through your normal daily routine, but you’re definitely feeling it a little bit more, that puts it more along the lines of the yellow light, where you need to take a few more rest breaks throughout the day, but you could probably get through a theme park day just fine.

Now, if you wake up and you feel that muscle soreness, and it’s making it really difficult to walk around, or it’s making it difficult to sit down into like the sofa or into a chair, or, you know, to be able to do your daily routine, it’s difficult to do that.

That means you’re heading towards that red light, or you’re in that red light, and you need to take a lot more rest breaks, maybe take longer rest breaks, or maybe take a whole rest day all together.

So those are the three topics that you are, the three strategies that you can use on your next theme park vacation.

And this is also something that you can utilize, and I really highly recommend you learn to use it long before your theme park vacation so that you can get into the automatic habit of using it so you don’t have to think so hard about it during your vacation. It provides you less mental effort to use it. There’s less mental space to have to think about it to use it.

That way you can use that extra mental space and mental effort to really plan how you’re going to go about your theme park day and make adjustments on the fly, have a magical time, be in the moment, and really enjoy yourself with your group, right?