News Flash: Exercise doesn’t have to SUCK.
Fake News: Exercise has to be exhausting, painful, intense, drudgery, boring…In other words, it has to be something you cannot enjoy.
Fact: In order to Maintain a level of health and vitality into our later years and to make the best of our early ones, you have to EXERCISE. You have to maintain Mobility, Strength , and Endurance to truly thrive for years to come.
Exercise can be something you actually look forward to when you honor your design, when you are patient with your body and stop trying to force change upon it. When you respect the Wisdom of the Body, everything about exercise and your perception of it will change.
Here’s 3 ways you can start to Honor your Design, learn to listen to your body and begin to see exercise and the process of change in a new light.
Pay attention to your Breath.
This is perhaps the simplest way to regulate your workout and make it more enjoyable.
There is no need to huff and puff . Whether you are Running, rowing, swinging a kettlebell or performing some kind of wacky circuit. If you are huffing and puffing, struggling to get air, chest breathing with shallow breaths, your body is telling you you have exceeded it’s current capacity and you need to slow down.
This one is really hard for people to digest and accept…We think we’re supposed to be out of breathe when we exercise. While it’s not the worst thing in the world, it certainly isn’t comfortable, no one likes the feeling of exasperation. This widely held mis-conception perpetuates throughout the fitness world but in REALITY, it’s harmful, and it’s false.
The reality is , your breath is a governor, a regulator. It lets your body know 1 of 2 things. I am safe, I can adapt to the stress you’re placing on me or I am not safe, you are shocking me and I don’t really know what to do with this!!
Unless you are preparing for an athletic event that will have you pushing your limits, there’s generally little need to train to the point that your are struggling to catch your breath.
Heavy , shallow breathing, and panting tells your body that the work you are doing is a threat to the system which in turn means you may be fighting against yourself if results are what you’re after and often doing more harm than good.
To actually Train to improve your capacity, you have to have the discipline to stop the activity you are doing when you can no longer maintain nasal breathing or atleast return to it within 30-60 seconds.
Example of how this works…Let’s say you just started a jogging routine ( because you LOVE to jog, not that you have to ~ I don’t, I hate it ) Anyways…The first time you go out , you jog for about 3 minutes at your given pace before you can no longer breathe through your nose and your heart rate is off the scale. Fine , stop and walk until your heart rate comes down and you are able to resume nasal breathing. Now you can choose to jog some more either at a slower pace or finish out your workout with walking.
Your body has a baseline, and since you just started this jogging routine , it’s fairly low, hence the reason you gassed out at 3 minutes. But having run and stopped at 3 minutes, listening to your body, you stressed it enough to give it something new to adapt to without Over-Stressing it.
A day later you jog again...This time you make 4 minutes before your mouth pops open, hey , 1 minute better and your heart rate is reasonable now. In just a couple of days your Co2 tolerance has increased and your fitness improved and you had to be out of breath once for a few seconds… Sounds pretty comfortable right?
A lot more comfortable than a burning chest and lungs, shin splints, and a bum ankle, that’s for sure!
And this cycle of gradual improvement repeats again and again as long as you keep showing up, and by using your breath as a governor , you can. If the body is not threatened, it will be happy to partake in your new healthy activity and it will continue to adapt as you progress.
Seeing that the only way to gain and sustain results is to keep showing up and be consistent, it might make sense to ensure your body doesn’t mind too much what you’re doing to it. One way to make sure it doesn’t mind too much is by staying in a “Parasympathetic” state as much as possible when training, which you do by keeping the tongue on the roof of the mouth and breathing nasally.
The alternative and what most people do on their first day is take off like a bat out of hell, start panting in the first 90 seconds and just keep pushing to whatever predetermined time or distance they think they need to reach.
When tomorrow comes, you’re hating life. You’re fatigued, sore and wondering why in the heck would I do that again?
There’s a time and a place for pushing it to the edge and beyond but if you are just looking to get fit, you really don’t have to. Just be patient, respect the wisdom in your design , trust your body and aim for the Minimal Effective Dose of stimulus. In time it will provide all you need.
2. Recognize that “Intensity” is earned.
When I first started training with Kettlebells , I would see these programs some of my colleagues and senior instructors were doing and think , hey, I can do that!
Sure, I could do it...
I would grunt, and strain and gut my way through it, be-groaning every moment, it sucked. I couldn’t make it look effortless like they seemed to. I didn’t understand Training…I was still working out. [ Click here to read “ Stop Working out” for more on that topic]
For me , these workouts were “intense”.
For them , it was just another day at the office, a “punch the clock” workout if you will.
Why?
Because Intensity is earned.
I know it’s sexy to do hard things, we love the image of the workout that leaves you in a pool of sweat on the floor, but I think it’s Waaaay sexier to make hard things look easy. And this is what I mean by “earning intensity”
Making “hard things” look effortless is a result of consistent practice. It is the result of gradual improvement. It doesn’t come by repeatedly doing impossibly “hard” workouts but by doing Moderately challenging workouts consistently and over time.
These days, several decades into my practice, the amount of work I can perform in just 15 minutes in a typical workout would take most , if they could complete it at all, an hour or more and even then , they’re definitely not doing it again tomorrow and they may not be able to walk for several days after. It would be very “INTENSE”...It’s all relative.
Recognizing that all you need to focus on is Showing up, getting the reps in, getting 1-2% better every week and what was “intense” 6 months ago or a year ago , becomes your warm-up.
To apply this in your training , think of your effort or intensity on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being a relaxing day at the beach and 10 being D-Day, it’s best to stay between 5-8 on the effort scale. In time 8’s become 6’s , 5’s and 4’s which means 10’s are now 7’s, if you had to go there ;-)
So to Honor our Design , don’t chase Intensity, be patient, allow it to build over time and make what was once “hard” to the Past You , feel easy to the Present you.
3. If you hate it, don’t do it.
Exercise is something we all need to do but we don’t all need to do the same thing.
Commonly held misbeliefs and marketing have led us to believe that the only way to build muscle is bodybuilding like Arnold with a thousand exercises for every body part and 3 hour long workouts. (Respect to those who can keep this up but jeez, I prefer to have a life)
We think the only way to improve our cardiovascular system is through endless hours of running, pounding the pavement and our joints into submission. I personally despise running stopped doing it 20+ years ago once I got out of the Navy, yet I have a resting heart rate in the 40’s, go figure( credit the magic of kettlebell ballistics).
Or we think that the only way to get strong is hoisting heavy barbells from the floor or squatting with them ( which I love but I know it’s not for everyone, and it’s not the only way to gain great strength)
There are so many ways to give the body what it needs to be strong and healthy and fit that we should never settle on anything that we don’t find some level of enjoyment in.
The Choice you never know is the choice you never make…so educate yourself and explore your options.
If it’s general fitness your after, there’s really just a handful of qualities you want to be sure you’re taking care of:
Mobility ( Ensuring that your joints all move how they were meant to)
Strength ( progressive and appropriate to what your life demands)
Capacity ( ability to repeat or sustain efforts / aka Cardio)
Honoring your design is mental and emotional as much as it is physical. If you despise your exercise routine, you despise a necessary part of this short life we are given, and depriving yourself of joy. So find a way to check these 3 boxes off in a way that you enjoy or at least can tolerate. Your body and your mind will thank you!
The simple systems I teach and utilize with my students at Edge of Strength respect and honor the principles I’ve laid out above. Here, training is made to be enjoyable as you effortlessly progress beyond what you thought possible!
Ready to learn to Honor your Design and thrive!?
Schedule your free Consultation today
Love and Strength to you ~ Coach Q
