“It’s kind of like going to the dentist,” exclaimed a gentleman who was interested in our personal training services. We offer two complimentary training sessions to potential personal training clients. These sessions help ensure our coaching style, environment, and plan are a good fit before anyone commits. When this gentleman arrived for his second session, his eyes were down, hands in his pockets, and he treated me like I was a highway patrol officer who had just pulled him over. When I asked how his first training session treated him, he compared the experience to getting a cavity filled.
I have nothing against dentists. They are miracle workers who have optimized my well-being more than I can imagine after a childhood of cavity history. I’ve also watched them repair a friend’s chipped tooth and give a family member a root canal that let her enjoy solid food again. However, when an hour of exercise ranks alongside getting a tooth pulled or checking into detention hall, something is wrong with the reason someone would want to invest their valuable time throughout their day in physical activity. Exercise is supposed to help us live happy, healthy, and strong lives. It shouldn’t feel like a sentence to be served.
It’s likely many of us can relate to this gentleman. Setting aside one to two hours a day a few times throughout the week for an exercise program can feel daunting. After a long day of work, the couch, a favorite show, and a snack are comforting and help us decompress. As humans, we usually gravitate toward the path of least resistance. If our history with exercise involves being punished with push-ups at high school sports practice or dreading the mile run in gym class, feelings of anxiety toward exercise can follow us into adulthood.
Nine times out of ten, the feeling after completing an exercise session is one people are grateful for. Stress from the day can decrease. The body feels looser, more energized, and a little stronger. We remind our personal training clients that the goal of a productive session is to feel better walking out of the gym than when they walked in.
How do we help the mindset catch up to the reward? Developing a sense of autonomy and self-government through consistent exercise throughout the week is a valuable first step. Exercise pays far more dividends when it is chosen rather than imposed. There is no rule stating fitness must look like a treadmill under fluorescent lights, slogging through a bout of mundane running on a moving sidewalk while looking at a cement wall for an hour. A bout of exercise-related physical activity might be a few games of pickleball, a hike among the trees at a state park, a morning dog walk, a group class with friendly faces, or a session with a coach who knows your name and your story. When we pick physical activities we enjoy, the desire to return to those activities increases.
Having something to look forward to is potent fuel for getting a workout in. Perhaps before a session, take ten seconds to recall how you usually feel afterward. After our clients complete a training session, they usually feel accomplished, decompressed, and glad they showed up. That memory can help carry us through the front door on the days motivation runs thin.
Giving yourself permission to take the hour and reserving it for yourself is important. The people who depend on us receive a better version of us when we are less stressed, more energetic, and physically strong. Over time, the sentence “I have to work out” can turn into “I’m someone who exercises, and I get to work out.” That shift plays a significant role in consistency. A lack of exercise puts the body in a deconditioned state. In contrast, consistently practicing enjoyable physical activity one to three times per week pays far more dividends than an intermittent, random session ever could.
As for the gentleman from our complimentary sessions, his story is still being written. Our job as lifetime fitness coaches is to keep discovering ways to make the rewarding side of exercise more appealing than the less desirable side. The human body adapts to the demands we impose upon it. Consistently practicing exercise helps produce strong muscles, reinforced joints, and a resilient state of mind. Perhaps the appointment we keep with ourselves can become less like a trip to the courthouse to pay an overdue parking ticket and more like a standing date with the strongest, calmest version of ourselves, and most importantly, something to genuinely look forward to for years to come.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.