First, we turn into hippos...

The first principle for doctors, based on Hippocrates, is not to cause harm.  This is actually good advice for all of us, and particularly as we approach our fitness.

Sometimes we get super excited about doing All The Fitness!  We want to lift everything, run forever, play with the professionals, and then go dancing.  I am the very last person to squash anyone’s enthusiasm.  But I draw the line at the part where we hurt ourselves by overdoing.

Rest and sleep are essential parts of fitness, as are food and drink.  There are days when the absolutely right decision is to go for a short walk, eat some fruit, and take a nice long nap in order to maximize our fitness.  Other days it can be all about the weights or it can be our personal Day of Kale or whatever.  We need to pay attention to what we actually need.

We’re in this for life, after all.

Three hours are probably not necessary...

Martin Luther once said, more or less, that he had so much work to do that he needed to spend the first three hours of his day in prayer.  Presumably, what he meant was that those hours of prayer enabled the rest of his work.

Now, Martin Luther is not exactly famous for his exercise programs or fitness.  And prayer during exercise is strictly optional (much like in schools, where, as someone once said, it will occur as long as there are tests; in an exercise context, I think that prayer is connected to lunges or burpees and can be summarized as “Please God let these be over soon!”).  Nonetheless, I would argue that exercise, for many of us, can have the same kind of effect on our work.  (No, I am not saying that exercise is a religion, or that we can sweat instead of pray, or actually anything about faith at all.  That is well beyond the scope of my practice or my intelligence.  I’m just making an analogy.  Which I will get around to in the next paragraphs.)

We often think we don’t have time to exercise.  We’re too tired.  We have too many things to do.  This could very easily have been Martin Luther’s attitude toward the discipline of prayer.  But he chose differently.  We can, too.

We need to squeeze in at least a little cardio anyway.

It will give us more energy, sharpen our brains, and create a sense of accomplishment.

Two at a Time!

When we exercise, we sometimes need to hold two opposing ideas in our minds at the same time.  (We get bonus points for working our brains along with our bodies!)

One of those ideas is that doing something is better than doing nothing.  Maybe we don’t run all that far or fast.  Maybe we don’t have the world’s greatest range of motion.  Maybe our weights have very small numbers on them.  That is all okay.

The other idea is that we need to do things right.  We want to hold ourselves to the goal of perfect form, of progress, of achievement.

The first idea gets us to show up in the first place.  It helps us take ourselves lightly and to let go of the extreme critical voice inside.  The second one builds character and self-esteem.  It gives us the big picture motivation.

We can do it.