DON’T Skip Your Workout! – How This Gym Rat Gets Inspired
from THE GYM RAT'S DAILY SQUEAKS http://marksfitness.wordpress.com/
“…I PROMISE I’ll go FIRST THING tomorrow morning!”
There are lots of reasons not to go to the gym, right? I’m too tired. I worked too late. The Gym’s been so crowded. My favorite show is on tonight. And for half of you, I’m having my … well, you know.
If your workouts are going to give you the kind of health and body you are looking for, your workout needs to be more important than ANY of these reasons, because one of these reasons will almost always be present.
One of the things our brains are great at is recognizing patterns. Patterns of the seasons, patterns of the speech of those close to us, patterns of behavior in our friends and enemies. There are thousands of patterns that our brains are familiar with, and they know whether the patterns are consistent or not. When patterns are consistent, our brains and bodies take them seriously and adapt to them in order to survive and thrive. When patterns are weak, our brains and bodies don’t take them seriously, so they do nothing.
The pattern that your brain and body pay most attention to is the pattern of your own behavior. For that reason, when you stick to a consistent pattern of working out, minimizing the number of times you miss or postpone workouts, your body will understand very clearly what your pattern is, and will tone up, build muscles, and lose fat in order to best serve your active life. When you treat your workouts lightly, skipping them when you are tired or because there is a happy hour after work, then your body correctly assumes that your heart isn’t committed to shaping up, so it doesn’t respond. When you DO work out, it becomes a WASTE OF TIME – REALLY!
Even though I’m a gym rat and a personal trainer, I am far from immune from being too busy, too late, too tired to work out. There have been many times I sat in my car in the gym parking lot thinking I really don’t have it in me to work out today. But I do it. How? I think one of these thoughts to inspire my butt through those doors. I hope some of them resonate with you!
- When a voice inside tells me “Mark, you’re too tired…go home”, what it is really telling me is “Come on lazy ass, don’t you want to be a little more fat and a little less strong tomorrow?” HECK NO!
- I tell myself “Fine, don’t work out, just go in the gym and walk around.” Once I’m in there, I say “Fine, just do one exercise.” Then “OK, just one more.” Before I know it, I’m done.
- “The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.” - Arnold Schwarzenegger
- I pretend that my workout is an Olympic Trial.
- I remember the skinny little teenager I was, who would never be able to stand up to a bully. I get mad again. I get psyched. I get out of my car and get into the gym.
- Because I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to work out and improve myself, I don’t have the right to not do it.
- The one I call upon the most? “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” – Steve Prefontaine
Are you inspired by landfills? No? I am. Less than a half mile east of my gym, in Arlington Heights, IL, is a landfill hill, almost a hundred feet tall. For those of you who don’t live in the Midwest, that doesn’t seem like much. But in the flat Northwest Suburbs of Chicago, it looks like a mountain. In the off-season when many professional football players used to eat, drink, relax, and gain weight, one of them didn’t. He lived in Arlington Heights, and he used to run to this landfill, and run sprints up and down it until he could do no more. He would invite friends, and none of them could keep up with him or even come close. So as I drive past Walter Payton’s Hill every day, I think “If he could become a champion using a giant pile of garbage, I can certainly do it with a gym!”
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Tune In Monday – ”My Summer On The Prairie Path – Part 1″
If you have any questions, comments, “beefs”, or suggestions for future topics, feel free to let me know. Reach me at thinwizzyfit@gmail.com, and feel welcome to link up with me through Facebook and/or LinkedIn.
