As the weather gets better, will you?

Remember last week’s three hypothetical 38-year-old males who asked me advice on how to shed 15 pounds of unwanted and unneeded weight?

They were created to help you handle something that usually occurs as the weather breaks: not only do you tend to exercise more but you also do more jobs inside and outside the house that require physical effort.

While we generally associate increased physical activity as a good thing, we always see getting injured or sick — including getting sick of working out — as a bad one. Too often, however, the bad thing comes a few weeks after the good thing sometimes in such a way that it obliterates the initial good.

Last week’s and this week’s columns were created to keep those “bad things” from happening.

And the bad thing being addressed when last week’s column ended was that mental state known as exercise burnout. Notice I called it a mental state.

Your body is rather resilient and generally recovers after a few days of rest or easy exercise. Only truly committed individuals — dare I say the obsessed ones? — can push themselves past the normal overuse indicators to create a burnout that’s actually physical.

Mental burnout, however — since it can lead to weeks or months or even years of not working out — may be even more harmful to long-term health.

Nate Llerandi, a former national-class swimmer and world-class triathlete who has coached athletes in both disciplines, avoids both types of burnout by making every fifth week in his training cycle or one he prescribes a recovery week. In an article for what’s now Hammer Nutrition, he explains that while his body would allow him to perform his normal workouts in that fifth week, by then he’s waking up “with less enthusiasm” for working out and “the thought of going hard is not appealing at all.”

So for one week he increases his amount of sleep and decreases the frequency and intensity of his workouts. By the end, he’s “ready to burst out of the gates again” and the workouts after the recovery week are far better because of it.

You, along with our three hypothetical, overweight males, would surely benefit from incorporating the concept of recovery to avoid burnout into your early spring workouts.

Our first overweight friend, the one who must drop weight or develop type 2 diabetes, needs to keep exercising no matter what, so he needs to be especially mindful of burnout. For him, a three-week cycle where he gives his utmost in his two weightlifting workouts and performs his three aerobic workouts moderately in the first week, followed by a week where he flips the utmost degree effort from weightlifting to aerobics, followed by a week of four less-than-intense workouts doing whatever he feels like — walks with the wife, bike rides with the 10-year old twins, or yoga at the rec center with a neighbor — could be the variety he needs to keep burnout from happening.

Our second overweight friend, the one with no real health issues or exercise goals other than to look and feel better, may want to simplify the process by following a prescribed online or video program. The key here would be for him to pick an exercise type and philosophy that appeals to him and to view the program differently than the way the instructor would explain it.

These programs are often rather impractical or too intense because the instructors need to insure results — and also put the onus on you. So if you fail to lose the “guaranteed” weight or the inches, it wasn’t that the program failed you, but that you failed to adhere to the program.

Our second friend, though, can interpret the instruction as guidance rather than gospel, use what appeals to him, and eliminate what doesn’t. Being selective like this works for our second friend, because weight loss is not the be-all to his workouts, only the byproduct.

What most interests him is having more energy and looking as if he does, too.

Our third friend, who wants to drop the unwanted weight so he can be highly competitive in running races once again, can use his prior experiences as a top-notch runner to guide him.

Because of something called muscle memory and the nature of the running he did in the past, he may be able to not to schedule predetermined easy weeks but to create week-by-week workouts based on perceived rate of exertion.

Out of the three hypothetical males, he is the one who has to put the most effort into selected workouts, with the key word here being selective. After this guy gets in shape, an all-out workout that includes some running at faster than his average race pace once or twice a week is a must.

Sometimes a runner can do such a workout and still benefit from a longer, albeit less intense run the next day. Other times, there will be a “deep” soreness in the legs that would only go deeper with such a run.

If that’s the case, male number three better do a really relaxed jog, followed by a good deal of stretching. If not, he increases the odds of illness or injury or physical and mental burnout dramatically.