CAIRO – 10 September 2017: Everyone talks about how great you feel once you train, about the high that you are on while working out and the wonderful effects that working out has on your body. Hardly ever do you read or hear about the internal and psychological struggle that accompanies the training process itself; rarely, do you hear about how on earth you get yourself back into training after being idle for so long and where that push comes from.
So much more internal struggles accompany an endeavor like getting fit than people care to acknowledge. Do you hear about the days when you just cannot get your body out of bed to head to your training session, and what you are supposed to do to overcome all of these challenges? And even more rarely do you hear about the moments during the sessions when you just want to give up and then you find yourself doing what you have to do to make your body fit and healthy. Through my experience, struggling with a few things myself, I have come up with a simple formula for helping everyone to reach their fitness goals.
Perhaps you spent all summer living it up by the beach and hardly getting yourself to the places where working out tends to happen, or say you have been so incredibly busy with life for the past year or two that you have not managed to take care of your health the way you should. At that point, the idea of getting yourself back into shape seems incredibly mountainous and far-fetched.
The way to deal with that is baby steps, and taking it one step at a time instead of overwhelming yourself by thinking 200 steps in advance. Show up one day and see how you feel at the end of that day; then show up the next day and think about only that day. If you take baby steps and live one step at a time, you will find yourself able to continue and suddenly you will notice that you have racked up momentum while you were not even looking for it.
We are humans; we are going to have our off days. Firstly, we need to recognize that this feeling is entirely normal; you will have your slower days where your energy levels are not up to par. It is very important to know that you are not alone; it happens to everybody and there is nothing wrong with you, these are the days when you should just listen to your body and give it the break it needs from life, work, or training. Then, there are other days when you just need to push past it; if your body tells your mind that it cannot, then your mind needs to push back and say that it will.
Now, once you have pushed back and told your body to get to the training session and you are there working out and doing your thing, you will get that moment that literally everyone gets in the middle of their work out where you just want to quit. It is in these moments that your mind tells your body to quit, and in those moments I always say, "Shut off your brain and just move your body."
At the peak of exhaustion during a training session, your mind is telling you to quit because you are exhausted because perhaps, your mind does not know that it can push your body past the point of that newly found exhaustion. I say, shut the noise inside your head and let your body shown your mind what it is capable of.
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