2h workouts 6-7 days a week to barely going for walks: Falling out of love with exercise.
(And 4 steps I’m taking to cultivate it instead.)
883 Words
I’ve got my favorite tank top and leggings on. The ones that make me feel unstoppable.
My pre-workout is tart. The second it his my tongue my brain knows it’s game time.
With good, loud music in my ears, I dance from machine to machine. Loving every rep of my workout.
“I made it” I thought.
“There’s no way this love could end.”
Boy was I wrong.
I was a book kid, not a sports kid
I tried to be active, but had little (if any) actual love for exercise. In 6th grade I spent many recesses in the library ffs.
Which is why when I fell in love with weightlifting at 22 I thought I had cracked the code.
“It’s finally a habit” I thought.
It felt effortless. My gym time was the highlight of my day.
Until I started working on my mental health at 24.
Meal prepping whole weeks turned into barely eating breakfast.
2 hour workouts turned into a pit of dread that froze me in place anytime I thought about the gym.
The more I supported my mental health, the harder things got.
It was so back asswards it made my head spin. Until I saw my “love” for what it was: coping.
2 years of working out almost constantly, yet very little actual progress. Why?
Because I wasn’t going to the gym for my health. I was going to maintain a sense of control in a situation where I had very little.
Once I was out of that situation, I got a lot of that control back. My love for the gym quickly turned into massive pressure to maintain what I had been doing before.
I know improving my mental health was the right move. But that didn’t stop all the feelings of failure.
I went from 2 hour sessions 6-7 days a week, to barely managing to take a 30 minute walk.
I didn’t understand how I could make that hard of a 180. I was so disappointed in myself.
Then the lesson sunk in.
Fitness is more like a relationship than we realize
When you find someone great, the honeymoon phase is fantastic. They’re fun, super easy to talk to, and everything is sunshine and rainbows.
But inevitably things get difficult.
You start disagreeing more, you annoy each other, and you start seeing things you didn’t before.
However, anyone that’s been in a long term relationship will tell you that just because things get hard doesn’t mean the relationship needs to end. It just means you have to start putting in work if you want things to work.
Learning to communicate better. Uncovering biases that affect how you see your partner. Developing the humility it takes to admit when you’re wrong.
You know what all those have in common?
They’re forms of growth.
If something is easy, it means you aren’t growing from it.
That’s not to say there will never easy times. But it definitely means there should be difficult times.
That’s why I needed to fall out of love
Of course it makes sense that as I healed my relationship with my mind, my toxic relationship with my body would suffer.
My mental growth showed me I deserved a healthy relationship with my body. And my body with me.
I had to learn what it really means to put in the work. That the mind needs to be challenged for the body to follow.
And that it’s wrong to manipulate my mind just to get my body to do what I want.
Now instead of waiting to fall in love, I get to cultivate it.
Here’s how:
First
I accept that waiting to stumble into that love again is a waste of time. It might happen, but it won’t be sustainable.
Better to purposefully start from the ground up than wait and hope for a shaky start at the top.
Second
I dial back my routine until it’s something I know I can do even when I don’t want to.
If that’s a 5 minute walk, so be it. Gotta start somewhere.
An intensive routine I have to bully myself into just attempting is the opposite of what I’m trying to do. If you think that’s the only way to go, *swats you with a newspaper* go. to. therapy.
Third
I feel the resistance and do it anyway.
Don’t try to solve it. It can’t be solved.
This is how we build that trusting relationship with the mind.
“I hear you. I know it sucks. But this is the right move.”
My brain and body need to know that it’s ok for it to suck. I’m not a bad person or unfit or whatever else just because it sucks.
Fourth (finally, and most importantly)
I celebrate that I pushed through.
This is how I own the growth I created by pushing through the suck.
Phrases like:
“it wasn’t that bad, why was I such a baby” minimize all the feelings I had before the thing.
Phrases like this on the other hand:
“That sucked, and I pushed through it. I did that. I climbed that hill.”
Train my brain to see how much I can accomplish. Providing me with more and more evidence to prove that I can tackle challenges.
I’ve just started
While I’ve had many beginnings on my health journey, I can honestly say this one feels like one of the most profound.
This was a pretty vulnerable one for me to write. I’ve been wrestling with these feelings for a while, and having a chance to articulate them has helped a lot.
I hope you find the change in perspective helpful. I know I have. Until next time.
Savannah
