Last week, a new client, Jackie, told me how much she resented her personal trainer for pushing her so hard. She didn’t like it! She told me he tortured her. It felt like punishment.
I suggested that she hired him to torture her. Instead of blaming him, I asked her to consider whether she had actually hired him to for this purpose? At first there was silence for more than a few moments as she took this notion in. Then, she agreed to my suggestion and admitted to herself for the first time, that she had hired him to push her hard, so she would work “hard enough” to make her exercise worthwhile.
Another part of the our phone session that week was to dissect what “hard enough” really meant, and more importantly, why she believed that physical movement had to be “hard” to count. Most of my readers know, by now, that I reject the idea that physical activity has to be hard to count, and have discussed the research justifying my stance.
Even after 1996 when the first Surgeon General’s Report came out with research showing that exercise did NOT have to be hard and vigorous to “worthwhile” and also that it could be accumulated through the day instead of in a single longer, session. This was over 14 years ago. Yet, I’ve found that most individuals do not at all understand this information. This is due to a few things.
There has been poor social marketing to educate Americans about these changes and what it actually means to them. It is also partly due to the weight loss mentality most have, which leads us to want to work harder when we exercise to burn more calories and “see results”. Most still don’t understand that exercise is trumped by dietary changes in producing weight loss and have EXTREMELY unrealistic expectations for how exercising is going impact their weight. In fact, exercising hard “to see results” winds up sabotaging the long-term weight loss goals that most women have.
When women exercise in ways that don’t feel good and select specific physical activities that they don’t like doing sets them up to lose their motivation for doing it. And stopping just a short while.
At first Jackie seemed reticent to take responsibility for her being the origin of the intense exercise that she resented doing. But she couldn’t deny that she had hired him just for that purpose.
Later that session, we discussed the idea of physical activity being a gift instead of a chore, and how to make that transformation she would need to start exercising in ways that felt “gift like”. So, instead of making herself run up a certain hill that was part of her walk because she was “supposed to” and that felt like torture to her, she could give herself permission to walk up it instead. She was keen on this idea.
If we don’t like what it feels like to exercise, we will NOT do it for very long. Then we miss out on the incredible benefits it really has to offer our daily lives. (Research clearly shows maintaining exercise is a key behavior for maintain any weight we might lose).
I just got off the phone from my following session with Jackie. She told me something that I hadn’t expected! I thought that she’d report that she stopped running up the hill as she tried to make exercise more like a gift. Instead, she told me she realized that running up the hill was a gift that she WANTED to give herself. In fact, when she ran up the hill last week, she had even enjoyed challenging herself. It now felt like a privilege to her.
Here’s the take away: Simply by taking ownership and responsibility for her intense physical work out, and deciding that by challenging herself physically that she was giving herself a gift, enabled her to embrace it. She now actually liked it! This highlights why being mindful of the reasons why we do things, especially things we think we don’t like, can be all we need, sometimes, to change our experience entirely.