Yesterday I talked a little about the difference between movement and exercise. We may want to start with movement and dip into exercise later, but we might have some beliefs that hold us back from doing either one. Let’s talk about some of those and see if we really need to keep those beliefs.
We might think that movement has to be hard or painful to be effective. I personally would like to have words with the person who came up with “no pain, no gain.” Pain is an important message from our bodies that we are doing something potentially dangerous. We do not want pain while we are moving. In fact, doing some moving can help us reduce the amount of pain we have in our bodies.
(I’m not going to lie and say that all exercise is always super duper fun and never ever uncomfortable because that’s just not true. Discomfort is not the same as pain. Our hamstrings will pretty much always complain when we do hamstring curls. I will always hate lunges. But, in general, most of the time movement and exercise should be somewhere between tolerable and great.)
We might think that we have to join a gym and figure out all those weird machines and fling dumbbells and make grunting noises to get in our movement or exercise. Nope. Things like dancing count. Half an hour of tag is a great way to move. Team sports count. So do swimming and skiing and hiking. Gardening definitely counts as movement, and, depending on what we’re doing, may be exercise, too.
We might think that we have to be good at whatever movement we do. I can say for a fact that I am a terrible swimmer. And I don’t care. I love swimming. My swimming counts as movement.
A related belief might be that people will make fun of us for being bad at whatever we are doing or for how we look while we do it. I can’t promise that people will always be kind, but I can say that most people are too busy worrying about their own stuff to pay much attention to anybody else. Also, blowing off jerks probably counts as movement. And do we really want the Mean Girls and Boys out there to keep us from feeling good? Don’t let them win! (Please note: gym anxiety is real and serious. It is totally all right for us to prefer to move by ourselves in private either forever or until we build up the confidence that we need to move with other people.)
Perhaps there is a theme here and that is: there are lots and lots of ways to move. It’s a fair bet that most of us will be able to find some kind of movement that we don’t hate. I’m also willing to bet that all of us will feel better when we do make the effort to move, even just a little bit. Experiment!
