No stressed-out corpses

Lately a lot of people I talk with seem to feel overwhelmed.  Maybe it is cumulative exhaustion from more than a year’s worth of pandemic.  Maybe it is the relief that is starting to come from the better news about vaccines.  Even good change is stressful.

 

So when we get to our workouts, we need to begin slowly and we need to be patient.  I admit, this is not my favorite way of being in the world.  I love to jump right in and try to do all of it Right Now.  Except that doesn’t work for fitness.  Fitness works best when we build it as a habit, so we need to make sustainable habits.

 

Starting slowly might mean choosing a ridiculously easy goal, like maybe walking for five minutes a day.  Once we have that habit, we definitely want to build on it, but we have to be careful not to get into the mindset of more-is-better.

 

Let me digress for a moment:  I have and wear an Apple Watch to track my movement and exercise and standing (I don’t care that much if I stand up in 12 different hours during the day, but it’s part of the package, so I do it.)  I call it my Wristy Overlord because it is always telling me what to do and God forbid that I should end a day without completing my circles!  The Wristy Overlord, when it sees that I have met my movement goal all week, tries to get me to agree to a higher movement goal for the following week.  It wants me to get on the endless upward staircase to failure, because at some point, I won’t be able to meet the increased goal.  Every week, I talk back to the Wristy Overlord and tell him that I have set my goals at my minimum acceptable levels ON PURPOSE because I know when I’m going above and beyond; what I need to know is whether I have done just enough or not.

 

Whether there is a Wristy Overlord involved or not, we all feel a certain amount of pressure to achieve more, faster, and better.  This can cause us to push ourselves beyond what is desirable.  We do not want to be very fit stressed-out corpses.  We want to be happy human beings.  It is true that we sometimes have to do unpleasant things to be healthier, but we want to strike the right balance between what we need to do and what we like to do.

 

Go play.  The right amount.