What’s going through your mind when you exercise?
Do you count down the minutes until it’s done, so you can finally get it over with? Do you will yourself through the exercises in your circuit class over and over, until you reach the next station, and then again and again and again…
Do you feel like you’re putting up with exercise because it’s the price you must pay in order to earn the pizza, a bottle of wine, or be ‘summer-ready’?
So you keep going, and you try new things to keep it fresh. But once the novelty of doing air squats, sit-ups, skater jumps, and burpees wears off, you’re pulling random workouts off the internet next and/or playing roulette with abdominal exercises on Pinterest with a Tabata timer.
Or if you live in Shanghai, you’re tuning into random zoom workouts, and now it seems like all you can do is burpees and tuck jumps, and you’ve done those a million times over, in random sequences but seemingly getting nowhere.
It’s either awful, boring, or frustrating. Yet you continue because you must sweat.
If you want to just sweat, that’s okay, as long as you know that sweat is just that, our bodies disposing of water. And you could choose to turn the actual heat up and you will sweat hard – zero risk to your joints, minimal effort required.
If you think ‘Sweat is your Fat Crying’, you should know that it’s one of the biggest myths served to us by the fitness industry at large delivered via our favorite social media influencers. Surely if this were true, everybody living in Singapore, and the southern tips of India would be bereft of body fat?
Hint – They are not, because that’s not how it works.
So, why should you exercise?
I implore you to take a second and think about whether there could be a deeper purpose for exercise.
I want you to consider that it doesn’t need to be this way, that exercise doesn’t need to feel punitive, a means to deserve something you love, or keep things you don’t love at bay (such as ‘extra bodyweight’).
I want to help you derive more meaning out of exercise than simply to sweat or burn fat.
Here’s an unpopular opinion for you to consider, and it requires you to reflect on what exercise actually does for you.
Fun fact – Physical exercise helps to train our muscles, joints, heart, lungs, and even our minds. We train our bodies so that they can support the life that we want to live, to allow us to perform all the ordinary and extraordinary physical feats of our daily lives with ease.
So you can carry your groceries home, pick up your children, play sports, hike mountains, live energetically and pain-free for the rest of your life.
Exercise doesn’t earn you pizza or a bottle of wine, and you’re always summer-ready when summer is ready for you.
When you begin to resonate with a deeper purpose for exercise, and what it can do for you, finding the will to exercise starts to become the easy part.
Training or exercising effectively and purposefully becomes the harder part.
Harder because it takes intentional design to make something effective and purposeful, rather than through performing workouts at roulette.
If you are ready to dive deeper, you can take a look at what I do at RISE Shanghai.
We curate our programs to cater to the functional demands of our physical bodies.
To build muscle so we can support our joints for daily movement.
To nurture proper movement patterns so that you are moving your limbs through their full range.
To develop your cardiovascular health so that you’re healthier, from the inside out.
Our training philosophy is threefold – Strength is imperative. Mobility is non-negotiable. Conditioning allows us to live life large.
