Episode 261 – I Bet You Don’t Even Get Tired When You Exercise
Posted on April 24, 2017If you’re new to the show welcome, if you’ve been listening for a while thanks for coming back we appreciate that you’ve taken time out of your busy day to listen and hope that in return you get some valuable information and some things that you can apply into your everyday life to be the healthiest and most active version of yourself.
Last week I was working with a client and during this particular session she was working very hard, I mean she always works hard, but during this particular session I wanted her to really feel like she worked out and accomplished something by the end of it, because on that day I could feel that she needed an accomplishment pick me up.
We went for a 20 minute walk where I set the pace so she could just barely keep up. After that we got into strength training and I had her do a lot of corrective exercises for her posture, which she finds incredibly challenging and compound or full body movements so her entire body was engaged. I thought she was having a really good session, her form was good and she was keeping up with the torrent pace that I had set for her, then with about 10 minutes to go as she transitioned from one exercise to the next she said she needed to take a break just to catch her breath for a second, which was of course fine she’d hardly taken any breaks up to that point. But as she was catching her breath she said this, ‘I’m really out of breath, why isn’t this getting any easier, I’ve been doing this for a long time it should be getting easier, I bet you never get out of breath like this.’
In that moment I knew what was going through her mind and I bet you’ve experienced it to some degree as well. Where you look at the person next to you effortlessly running at a speed double the one you’re throwing up at, or the person the same size as you that can somehow ‘easily’ lift 10 more pounds or the person who’s helping you carry a couch and they give you a hard time because you have to take so many breaks on the way to it’s final destination. I know I’ve been on both sides of this coin so I know exactly what she was feeling and can understand where she’s coming from.
So we had a chat about it. When we first started working together she couldn’t lift her arms over her head and now she can easily lift 5 pounds to that very position, if we went for a walk together she had to periodically take breaks and sit on the bench and now she does over 2 km in under 20 minutes and during our very first assessment she couldn’t hold a plank for 30 seconds and now she can hold it on a stability ball for a minute.
There are a couple of takeaways here,
Difficulty is relative to each individual person and you have to remind yourself of that. You could be looking at someone running double your speed and think wow that person’s fast and that person could be thinking, I’m 1 mph off my pace today, what did I do that’s making me suck so much and another person could be looking at you, wow that person can run and all I can do is walk, I wonder how long that took, which ties into the second takeaway.
If you’re exercising effectively you’re going to be growing, which means in order to exercise effectively you have to continually challenge yourself, which means relatively speaking it never gets easier, but absolutely speaking it absolutely does, every great runner started as a walker, who started running as a poor runner, who became a good runner, who became a great runner who laughs at how bad they were when they started.
So the next time you get out of breath and need to take a break, take a minute to think back on how far you’ve come, maybe it’s how you’re stronger at specific exercises, maybe you’ve become faster or maybe you’ve been working out consistently 3 times a week instead of two times a week. Catch your breath and in that moment remember how far you’ve come and then once you’ve caught your breath and you’re ready, go hit it hard so that two months from now when you’re catching your breath you can look back at this moment and say to yourself ‘yeah, I’ve improved a lot in 2 months.’
