As You Wish...

In theory, being a Fitness Professional, I know better.  One would think that I would be immune to laziness, junk food, and seductive couches.  One would be wrong.  I have the exact same struggles as everyone else.  What I do get, included with my Fitness Professional deluxe package, is more tools to use to attack those struggles and maybe a tad more experience with the wrestling.

When I’m there on the couch with my popcorn and my 27^th episode of some cop show or other and I feel gross, I have to kick myself in the butt (figuratively.  It is almost impossible to kick oneself in the butt while sitting on a couch eating popcorn…).  I know that I’m not going to feel immediately better if I go lift weights or hop on the spin bike.  In fact, I might even feel temporarily worse.  The thing is, I know that I get to choose.  I can stay there and continue to feel horrible, or I can get moving, feel horrible, and then feel better.  Maybe it doesn’t sound encouraging to say that feeling horrible is inevitable.  Feeling horrible in order to feel better seems more encouraging than just plain feeling horrible, to me.

Or, to put it another way, Wesley points out in The Princess Bride that life is pain and that anyone who tells you different is selling something.  We can choose pointless pain, or the kind of pain that leads to awesomeness.

How are we going to get awesome today?

Monday Workout: Joints!

This week’s plan is to get our hearts pumping while we do some good muscle building!  We have a bunch of mulit-joint exercises that should do the trick.  Three rounds.

suitcase swings	30
bench press	20
YTA	10
woodchoppers	30
ball slams	20
rescues	10
(jump) squats	30
rows	20
barbell twist	10

Or I could just play Calvinball...

One of the ways I motivate myself is by making up games.  What makes games different than just screwing around is rules.  When a game stops working for me, I change the rules.

For example, I have the photo game.  Every time I work out, I take a photo of something.  Simple enough.  The thing is, I work out, most of the time, in the same locations.  It’s boring to take a photo of the same thing every time, so while I’m moving my body, I’m thinking about how to take a different photo, how to find a new angle, how to find freshness.  Robert Frost talked about non-rhyming poetry as playing tennis without a net—my photos have to find a way over the net of sameness.

Another wellness game I have involves a post-it note on my computer.  (Actually, a lot of my games involve post-it notes…)  I’ve written about it before.  It has four words on it:  body, mind, creation, and connection.  I try to do something in line with each of those words every day to keep myself healthy and moderately sane.

I’m trying a new post-it game this week.  This one has two categories:  short-term and long-term.  The goal is to do something to make both better.  So maybe I take a nap to make my short-term self feel better and then I get some exercise to meet my long-term wellness needs.  Or I could have a snack for short-term and make it an apple and almond butter to contribute to long-term better nutrition.

We can find ways that work!