The very hardest part of working out is getting started. In economics, I believe this is called opportunity cost. In physics, it’s about overcoming inertia. Uncle Patanjali, in the yoga sutras, phrases it slightly differently: To begin is the victory.
Knowing this, we can strategize about how we can begin. Maybe we need to negotiate with ourselves, as a woman I met in the gym a while back suggested: just go LOOK at the weights. Then the hard part is done: we’re there, in the gym. Picking them up and working with them is relatively easy after that. Some days I tell myself I just have to do spin for five minutes; by the time that five minutes is done, I have remembered how much I like spin and I feel the energy surge I get from doing it. The point is to make beginning stupidly easy, so that we have as few barriers to starting as possible.
Again, physics explains this with the same idea of inertia. While bodies at rest tend to remain at rest, bodies in motion tend to remain in motion. Just start. It gets easier from there.
No comments:
Post a Comment