Exercise is a lot like a relationship – there are ups and downs, good days and bad, compromise and sacrifice, gains and losses. The benefits are wonderful, but they don’t come easy. It takes time and effort to create and maintain your workout routine, so having a healthy relationship with your workouts is critical to your success. Why? Because your level of success is directly tied to your self-motivation.
When you see progress towards your health and fitness goals, you’re more likely to stick with the process of working out. You start to look forward to your workouts and fall in love with the feeling of accomplishing each workout. Loving your progress is loving the process, and it’s this love of the process that creates a healthy relationship with exercise.
But there are those moments when you don’t see progress. You may hit a plateau physically, mentally, even emotionally. You may get extremely busy at work and miss a few workouts. Or you may endure an injury or illness that sets your progress back. These are moments that test your relationship with exercise, and how you respond to them determines whether you fall out of love with the process.
While it can be tough to work through these setbacks, it’s important to remember that like any relationship there are ups and downs. Just because you may be experiencing a “down” moment doesn’t mean that you should get out of this relationship. If you’re falling out of love with exercise, try to “woo” yourself back into the relationship – What made you see changes initially? What part of your workouts did you enjoy the most? Do you need to make a change to refresh your workouts and your energy? Take yourself on a date to a new piece of equipment, or try a new Group Fitness class, or take advantage of your free Personal Training consultation – see if trying something new gives you a fresh outlook and return to progress.
The reward comes when you fall back in love and stay until you see your love of the process returns. You can truly be in love with exercise, so have regular “dates” with yourself at the gym to nurture this relationship – it may just be the best one you’ll have!
Your lover of exercise,
Alison
Alison Leach is a Certified Personal Trainer through AFPA (American Fitness Professionals and Associates) and has been training at American Family Fitness Mechanicsville for 10 years. She holds specialties in recovery, nutrition, and aquatics also. Alison has experience in athletics training as she played soccer, tennis, and volleyball, and in 2015 she competed in a figure competition and won first place Figure Novice class OCB. After experiencing a spinal fusion firsthand and learning how to recover from it, Alison has learned how important it is to have a positive mental attitude every day and instills this same attitude within her clients. When she’s not training clients at American Family Fitness Mechanicsville, Alison works with special needs children and enjoys spending her spare time with her husband and two sons.
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