Episode 128 – How to Find Exercises You LOVE as Your Goals Change
Posted on June 3, 2016
Today’s an important episode about your shifting landscape and how exercise will change as you age, sometimes this means you used to be a competitive athlete and now you’re just trying to be healthier, it could mean that at some point you followed a bodybuilding style program, but now you have kids, a career and not nearly as much time or it could mean you’re getting older and you officially no longer care about having a ‘6 pack’ and just want to be strong and mobile enough that you can outdrive your friends on the golf course. As you get older and your abilities and goals change you’re exercise program needs to change as well and we’re going to get introspective about your exercise program so you can ask yourself the right questions to make sure you’re doing the right types of exercise routines.
That’s not all for today, it’s also fun day Friday so stick around until the end of the show because we’re giving away a free lifetime membership to our online fitness and lifestyle design community where we have hundreds of exercise programs and a dozen courses to guide into being the healthiest version of yourself. If you would like to be entered into this random draw all you have to do is leave us an iTunes rating and review, now let’s get to it.
Change is really hard, trying to change a habit, trying to change how you interact with people to be friendlier, even changing the way you drive to work can be hard, maybe going a different way is in fact faster, but you may never know if you’re not wiling to try it, on the same hand you have to be okay with the fact it may be slower, but on the upside if that’s the case at least you know you tried and it re-affirms your current way of doing it.
The vast majority of people get involved in fitness in one of 3 ways:
1. They were competitive athletes and fitness was a part of their training to be better at their sport
2. They watched a t.v show, picked up a magazine, had a fit friend or saw a really fit person in ‘real life’ so they were inspired to start training to try and be more like that person or
3. They had a heart attack or some other disease that exercise can play a large roll in preventing so they start exercising to try and prevent that from happening again or getting worse
These are all really good reasons to start exercising, the problem is that whatever way you start exercising becomes your global view of what exercise is. Let’s say you were an athlete when you were younger and you were required to do a lot of running as exercise to train for your sport, even though you hated running you did it anyway because it’s what you needed to do to be successful at your sport, so if it’s something you really hated you’ll come to the belief that you hate exercise, because running is how you exercise. Conversely if it’s something you really loved you are more likely to come to the belief that running is the only way to exercise, which is fine until you hurt your hip and can’t run anymore and then you think you can’t do any exercise because it hurts your hip too much.
The first step to break out of this frame of mind is to realize you’ve put yourself in that box in the first place. What I want you to do right now, unless you’re driving, then you can do this later, is write out every single way you can exercise, you can pause this if you need to that’s no problem, but don’t take longer than a minute.
And we’re back, okay how big is your list?
If it’s under 5 you definitely have some limiting beliefs about what exercise is and you should definitely continue listening, if it’s over 5 I want you to put a little mark beside the ones you already do.
The whole point of this little activity is to get you a little bit outside of your scope. To get you to creatively think about exercise, what did you write down? Weightlifting, hockey, step class, zumba, cross fit, running, cycling, swimming, squash, dancing, How many different types of dancing are there? Let’s dig into those, functional strength training, martial arts, spartan races, yoga, pilates, follow along workout videos, the list is endless, even within this list there are sub categories for level of difficulty and intensity.
These are all the different ways you can exercise, now I want you to go back to your list and make it as big as you can, put every type of exercise and physical activity you can think of on it and I want you to pause this, Ready go:
and we’re back, again
Now I want you to put a big ‘X’ through the ones you hate and put a check mark beside the ones you enjoy.
Now think about your goals and what it is that you really want in life and how exercise helps you achieve that, write those down if you want, this is your space. Now I want you to put another checkmark beside the activities you like and the ones that will move you closer to your goals.
If you did this activity properly you should have at least 5 types of ‘exercise’ that you enjoy doing and will move you towards your goals, now all that’s left is to go out and do those activities, try them and if they turn out to not be as fun as you thought or they don’t quite give you the results you’re looking for move to the next activity.
Training for life is very different than training for a sport and training for each stage of life is different again on top of that, as you age your goals will change and how you exercise should change to reflect that. Once you accept exercise can come to you in many different forms this get’s a lot easier, so go out there and find some activities you love to do.
