“Exercise should be a celebration of what your body can do. Not a punishment for what you ate.”
Dylan Thacker, Twitter
Most people try to “punish” themselves into being fit.
They “kill” themselves at the gym. Sign up for military-like bootcamps. Pay personal trainers to scream at them when they’re fatigued. There’s a whole lot of self-induced torture going on in the exercise world today.
And then those same people are surprised when they’re miserable and hate the idea of exercise. And it’s no wonder!
I’m here to tell you this doesn’t have to be your reality.
You don’t have to torture yourself into good health. In fact, this shouldn’t be your path towards good health—it’s an ugly path. As Dylan says above, it should be a celebration.
So, how do we celebrate exercise? By aligning ourselves with forms of movement that we enjoy doing (at least more so than others).
Because let’s not make exercise into something it’s not—it’s always going to involve work. It just doesn’t have to involve torturous work. Some ideas:
There’s a million ways to move. Experiment and find what works for you.
Don’t be like most people—celebrate your way to being fit instead.
The more we associate movement to work the less likely we are to do it.
When you look at kids, movement is natural.
They run, skip, and jump without any mental resistance or worries at all—all while being told that they need to calm down and “stop,” by adults.
How ironic, that when we get old, we are told we aren’t moving enough and that we need to start running, skipping, and jumping more.
…And then end up paying huge sums of money for boot camp trainers, fitness guides, and programs that’ll hopefully, somehow, maybe retrain our brains to overcome the mental resistance and worries that were once non-existent.
Maybe, we could learn a thing or two from kids.
Maybe, if we stopped looking at exercise as an obligation and looked at it as an expression of bodily freedom, we’d more joyfully move our way to health without so many daily, mental battles and wars.
Equal actions often produce unequal results in different people.
Otherwise, everybody could copy precisely what their favorite fit person was doing and get precisely the same results.
As nice as that would be, it isn’t the reality.
Some people never lift a weight and appear fit. Others lift religiously and appear unfit.
While this is a hard truth to grasp, the secret to escaping this demoralizing thought process is actually quite easy: stop comparing yourself to others.
Because while equal actions may produce unequal results, positive actions always leads to positive results in the individual.
And so while your results may not look the same as the person whose lifestyle you’re copying, what also isn’t the same is the person you become after taking those positive actions.
No self-improvement effort is ever wasted. Not even the ones that fail miserably.
The biggest waste isn’t to have tried and failed—it’s to never have tried at all.
For what those initial efforts offer us is something that never trying never could: insight.
Remember this when others are:
What some people can do to stay fit isn’t what YOU might have to do to stay fit—keep taking positive actions anyway.
While working out, I think about how I don’t want to workout.
When I don’t workout, I think about how I should’ve worked out.
The first burns ~60 minutes of thinking from my day.
The latter burns closer to ~600 minutes.
Get it?
Now go get done what you know needs to get done.
With the possibility of a 10x return on your investment, you’d be crazy not to.