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Why Do You Exercise?
There’s one of those simple questions, one that gets harder the more you think about it. “To feel better,” we might say. “To get in shape” is another common reply. But we can keep asking further questions that stem from those ones: “why do you want to feel better?” or “why do you need to get in shape?” The answers aren’t always easy, and they aren’t always clear.
And that’s why we feel everyone needs to set aside some time to think about this — to think about why you want to do these workouts, why you truly want to get in shape, and what keeps you making that effort.
THE SMOKER’S PARADOX
Here’s a helpful example: you probably know a few people that smoke. And they continue to do so, even though they know it will shorten their lives. Are they crazy? Addicted? Clueless? Not really, no.
People smoke for lots of reasons, but one big reason they can’t just quit when the health scares are spelled out for them is because that threat is so vague, so many years away, and so unspecific. The idea of ‘just one more cigarette’ never really connects with the terrible threat of lung cancer like it should.
Funnily enough, the same thing can happen with exercise. We probably all have a general purpose in mind when asked “why do you want to get in shape?”, but even if we do, it can often be so grand, so big, so general, that it becomes useless as a motivator.
MARY WANTS HER BODY BACK
Let’s look at some hypothetical examples of general purpose.
Mary wants to regain something she once had: She’s in her mid-40s, about 40-50lbs overweight, but determined to start a solid, strong exercise program, to get back that body she last had at the end of her 20s.
It’s good, because she really wants to get something back that she had before. She felt stronger then, and her confidence was higher — if she gets that body back, chances are the same things will happen again.
But this is also a very large, unwieldy thing to have as your purpose: an idea that you can regain all you once had. It’s liable to get mixed up with all sorts of nostalgia, of recapturing something that can’t really be the same, and it’s a massive thing to keep in the front of your mind.
It’s not wrong, of course — having a purpose is never wrong, but it needs to be one that can be drawn upon, that can be used in your day-to-day life.
TOM WANTS TO STICK AROUND FOR HIS GRANDKIDS
Here’s our last example.
Tom is a new father, but wants to be around well into his old age: Keeping up a healthy lifestyle is the #1 way to stick around on this planet. Everyone knows it and acknowledges it. And Tom does too, and he wants to stay healthy and active for his eventual grandchildren; he wants to be around as long as humanly possible.
This is a wonderful, noble purpose to have, but it’s also one of exceeding, extraordinary range — when you get up in the morning and go for a run, it can be hard to balance the desire to be around for your grandchildren with the immediate, more pressing demands of that morning. What’s one missed jog, after all? Those grandkids are probably 35 years away.
This is the heart of the matter.
Associating each individual workout with a grand, great purpose is both excellent, and a tricky way to avoid exercise when you need it the most — which is every time. Starting each workout is just as important as the one before it, and drawing on the same huge, grand purpose every time is going to produce diminishing returns after a while.
HOW TO DEVELOP A PURPOSE YOU CAN DRAW UPON
When you have a purpose in mind, it needs to be one that is useable, that can be drawn on when you need it. You need to actually sit down and think about why, fundamentally, you want to exercise. That will be your purpose.
Come up with the big things, the overview things, the 20-year-plan, and keep those in mind. But see them for what they are: guiding lines, the soft-but-constant guardrails that steer our life in the direction we want it, not easy, simple, every day things we can conjure up in front of our noses when we need a quick shot of motivation. Hold on to them, but acknowledge that our minds sometimes need something far more immediate.
What we need are objectives. To be able to reach our deep, fundamental purpose (or purposes), we need smaller, achievable steps. Just like a novel is divided into chapters, which are then split into paragraphs, our grand purpose (when it comes to staying healthy and being in shape) must be divided and parsed down, and above all kept reasonable with simple, attainable goals that we can reach and conquer.
HOW TO CREATE YOUR OBJECTIVES, WITH SOME REAL EXAMPLES, TOO
It’s as simple as this: set a series of clear, attainable outcomes.
We can’t stress enough how important these things are, how fundamental they can be to your success. There are dozens of ways to do it, and they all center around setting measurable, specific goals.
Get visual: Take a series of ‘before’ photos of yourself — in profile, from the front, and from the back. Wear the clothes you use to workout, print out the photos, and keep them somewhere useful.
Set a specific period of days whereupon you’ll take the next set of photos: 15 or 30-day periods are generally a good idea, and can give you a great sense of completion and accomplishment when you see them.
Keep a journal: Write down, in a clear and re-readable fashion, every time you exercise. When you’ve worked out several times over a two or three-week period, it’s extremely gratifying to see how often you’ve done it, because you’ll get a real, tangible sense of the effort you’ve put in.
Keeping other pieces of information in the journal can help, too: healthy meals you’ve eaten, the way you feel after a particular workout — anything that might keep you motivated when you’re feeling down.
It might be surprising, but going back and reading over exercise-related things you’ve written in a journal can be a huge motivation. Even just seeing the words “worked out” on a calendar a few times in a week can make the tiny mental difference between taking that next step or falling off the wagon.
Keep track of your weight the smart way: Our weight fluctuates by small degrees no matter what we do, and it can be difficult to always stay on track when one day it appears we’ve actually gained weight, despite all that working out.
To supplement the power of your positive thinking, and make sure that scale readouts don’t throw you off track too much, try and implement the physics diet weight measurement system, as explained here. It plots your weight on a graph, and allows you to see your overall progress, rather than individual entries. And it’s dead-simple.
At the moment, there is no better system for mentally ignoring those small fluctuations in weight than to use this. Of course, if you would rather escape tracking your weight entirely (as just tracking weight is a rather limited system of measurement in the first place), try measuring yourself by inches or centimeters instead of focusing on pounds or kilograms — empirical weight won’t ever tell you the whole story, anyway.
VISUALIZING YOUR OUTCOMES
Here’s another useful trick: visualization. It’s one of the most simple around, but it works wonders. If you’re thinking about working out, but your motivation is flagging, just picture yourself at the weight you want to be, or in the shape you desire. You might be thinking: “hey, we’ve all pictured ourselves differently before, so how is this any different?”
Here’s why: Picture yourself like this for 2-3 minutes straight, not just a quick thought. Make it a serious effort. Think about different clothes, different situations, different people who haven’t seen you for a while — and then keep doing it. Behavioral scientists use this trick to get people to defer or put off big purchases: when you’re in the store and about to buy something on impulse, often just picturing yourself with it, realistically, for a few minutes (not seconds — rather enough time to let your mind really get to work), will help the impulse to pass.
The same principle is at work when you visualize a better, fitter you, but in reverse: because impulse buys are often quite a bad idea, the visualization helps you avoid them. But because getting in better shape is an exciting, great thing, a sustained effort at visualization can be just the motivation you need.
TWO THINGS TO TAKE AWAY FROM ALL OF THIS
If you’re feeling lost about your reasons for working out, unclear about why all this work is worth the effort, or just need a few ways to get focused and make sure your body is doing what your brain wants it to do, spend some time on these two things.
Think about it again: purpose and outcome. Think big, acknowledge those big purposes and grand ideals for what they are — general guidelines for our lives — and then scale downwards. Set realistic goals and attainable outcomes that you can point to in order to reach them.
You’ll never reach the stated purpose of ‘staying alive until I’m 100’ if that’s your main objective, too, so understanding the difference between these two things and spending some real time sorting them out and asking yourself what you want from exercise is just as important as starting that next workout.
HOW TO START RIGHT NOW
Get a notebook and devote 20 or 30 minutes to this task, and be realistic. You’ll find that seeing things written down, out of your head, and clearly written on the page will work wonders for your mind.
When you realize that you can’t always draw on a vague idea of ‘living longer’ when you need help getting out of bed for an early-morning workout, you’ll reach for something else: a journal, a before/after photo, or a realistic objective you’ve written down for yourself in a journal.
And then, after that workout, when you’ve sweated and grunted your way through 40 minutes of effort, you’ll be able to think with positive satisfaction about your bigger purposes and realize that what you just did contributed directly to fulfilling them.
The more you can engage your mind and clarify your reasons for exercising, realizing which ones will help you and which ones will guide you, the better you’ll work out, and the easier you’ll stay on track.
Our minds are incredible, beautiful things — the more we can use them to our benefit, the more our bodies will thank us in the end.
Best,
Frederick
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