Episode 281 Tips – How Can You Ever Expect to Enjoy Exercise When You Use Words Like Torture and Suffering to Describe It?
Posted on July 3, 2017One of our trainer’s Richard just started working with a new client and after their first session she came on our facebook page and posted this and I quote:
Thank you Richard, a bit of torture today but I feel great 🙂
A client I used to work with that was trying to lose weight, would eat a bag of potato chips everyday in the afternoon for a snack, not a little bag, a big bag and after months of trying different strategies to get her to not stop, but just eat less or a smaller bag, I finally asked her why she needed to eat potato chips everyday and her response was – Because I don’t want to suffer and to me not eating chips is suffering.
Another time I had a client go from doing a stability ball wall squat directly to push-ups without a rest and she called me a sadist for putting two exercises so close together, and then she gave a kind of I’m joking, but not joking laugh.
Before I go on, I want to read this brief excerpt from an article Congressman Sam Johnson wrote about being a POW during the Vietnam War – A link to the original article can be found in the shownotes here – http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/i-was-vietnam-pow-donald-trump-120436
Enemy shots caught our right engine on fire, and as the plane was going down, we ejected just before the aircraft crashed. In the midst of parachuting, my back and right arm broke and my left arm was severely injured. After landing, I struggled to get to higher terrain and, while trudging through the jungle, was quickly found by a flood of North Vietnamese soldiers, who eventually took me to Hoa Lo Prison, the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” where I would spend the next almost seven years of my life held captive by the Vietcong.
I was 35 years old, a husband and father of three small children. Forty-two of those months were spent in solitary confinement with 10 other fine American patriots because the Vietcong labeled us “diehard” resistors. And let me tell you, those years of physical and mental torture, away from my family, were hell.
As a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, I could recall nothing from military survival training that explained the use of a meat hook suspended from the ceiling. It would hang above you in the torture room like a sadistic tease—you couldn’t drag your gaze from it. During a routine torture session with the hook, the Vietnamese tied a prisoner’s hands and feet, then bound his hands to his ankles—sometimes behind the back, sometimes in front. The ropes were tightened to the point that you couldn’t breathe. Then, bowed or bent in half, the prisoner was hoisted up onto the hook to hang by ropes. Guards would return at intervals to tighten them until all feeling was gone, and the prisoner’s limbs turned purple and swelled to twice their normal size. This would go on for hours, sometimes even days on end. Aside from leg irons and leg stocks—both of which were used on me for months and years on end—the meat hook was a favorite instrument of torture at the Hanoi Hilton.
I want you to think about this for a minute, the language that many people use to describe exercises or living a healthy active lifestyle is almost identical to a Veteran talking about their experience as a prisoner of war, being in solitary confinement, hung on a meat hook and being beaten with sticks and rods.
I realize many people say this under the guise of a joke, but inside of every joke there is a grain of truth.
Yes exercise can hurt and sometimes be uncomfortable. I understand there are certain types of food that people get addicted to and it can be incredibly challenging to not eat them. Exercising and eating healthfully isn’t always going to be enjoyable especially when you’re first starting out. You’re going to question your motives, sometimes you’re going to want to give up and for most people it’s not going to be easy. That being said, if you’re someone who wants to change, by exercising more frequently and eating differently and more healthfully the minute you start using language like torture, agony, suffering, hell and misery you’ve already lost the battle, because these are words, it’s language that carries a lot of weight and it signals to you, both conscious and unconsciously that you hate these changes you’re trying to make and if you hate the changes you’re trying to make what are the chances you’re going to be successful?
If you hate the changes you’re trying to make what are the chances you’re going to be successful?
Probably not very good, especially over the long term. There is no easy fix here and quite honestly we’re probably at the edge of my scope of practice, but I know as soon as I start hearing language like this from a client we immediately talk about it, I try to find out why their using this kind of language, are they just trying to be funny? If that’s the case we talk about how this kind of powerful negative language is a really slippery slope, even if you are joking and I try to help them be more aware of when they’re talking like that, so they can try to re-frame the new actions they’re taking. If they truly hate what they’re doing, I mean truly hate what they’re doing like there’s no way around it and this detrimental language really applies, then we try to shift the types of exercises they’re doing shift or to something else that is active in a different more enjoyable way, for them.
This is obviously a very complex topic and there is no ‘silver bullet’ way to approach it, but I think the first step would be, to become cognisant of the language you use to describe exercise and eating healthfully. If you find yourself using words like torture, agony, suffering and hell, you need to ask yourself why you’re doing it. I want you to consider everything we’ve talked about here, do you actually feel that way, if you do then you need to change something else or find different more enjoyable activities. If it’s language you use out of habit or you think it’s funny you may be sabotaging yourself without even realizing it. Try switching your language up to focus on what you’re accomplishing and the progress you’re making.
