We all have at one time or another muttered and cursed under our breath about the pain of having to exercise, yet deep down we all know that we must.
I mean, all of us know deep down (and for some it really is well hidden), that for us to live healthy lifestyles we really do need to be putting some sort of effort into making proper exercise a reality.
I’m afraid to say that lifting the remote controller off the coffee table to change channels, or rushing to the
toilet during the ads after drinking 6 cans of beer while the game airs, doesn’t really count for a lot!
So what makes one person leap out of bed in the early hours of the morning to go for a run, while others roll
over and snuggle deeper in their blankets telling themselves that tomorrow will be the big day?
It comes down to focus.
What you focus on you will achieve. You see if we focus on all the reasons why we shouldn’t, or can’t be bothered to exercise, then we create the perfect environment to justify
why we won’t, and we then end up not doing a thing.
We dream up great reasons for not doing things. We focus on the weather, the time of day, our current physical
condition, in fact we can find anything at all as a great reason not to do something.
So what happens now becomes our next major hurdle. You see, we build on these excuses and as time goes by we
really do start to believe them, and they start to become our reality.
Do you want to know the truth?
I used to do the same thing for years on end. I would tell anyone who could be bothered to listen, that I just
couldn’t run to save myself (I was conveniently forgetting that many other forms of exercise was available to me other than just running) and boy did it work for me! I did nothing for years, except put on weight and feel worse about myself.
Focus finally pushed me into waking my ideas up to take action. I started focusing on all the reasons why I should do exercise on a regular basis. I started looking at how good I would start to feel after exercising, instead of how bad I thought I would feel during exercise. I started focusing on how well I would feel, how my general health would improve and all the good things I could think of that would come from doing some form of regular exercise.
All of a sudden I found that if I monitored my heart rate while I was running, and then ran in my zone, magically I was able to string the miles together and not crumble to a heap when I finished. And it doesn’t stop there. Once you start, you then begin to see other opportunities that you were once unable to before hand. You actually want to look into different activities, start joining groups and meeting other people. Once you begin to associate with others of similar thinking and you start feeling even better about yourself, you won’t ever want to go back to your old ways.
So next time the alarm goes off and you can’t be bothered getting up, have a good think about why you must exercise and then leap out of bed and do it!
Your body will love you for it.
