What Are You Training For
You walk into the studio with your workout wear on, your water bottle in hand and hopefully an attitude to put up with me and my music. This might be the place you’ve called home for the past five years, or you might still be trying to figure out how to read my handwriting on the wall. Making your way down to the studio may have been an easy decision, and confidence carried you through the door. Or you may have struggled to get out of your car and every muscle in your body was convincing you to go back home. Finding the right class and the right fit is hard. It can be discouraging and humbling, it can be frustrating and embarrassing. But it can also be rewarding and fulfilling. Finding your inner reasons to show up and work hard is the key to your fitness success.
Success starts the minute you walk though the door, that is the first step and a lot of times the most challenging step. The reasons you showed up are personal, it could be to accomplish a grand goal you put in motion or it could be an escape from your kids and a little much needed sanity for an hour. Some people walk into the studio with specific ideals of what they want from their workouts, what they expect from their bodies and how they want to feel when they leave. And most walk in finding comfort in the knowledge that the workout will be designed for them, I will be there to coach them and everyone around them will help push them to the finish.
Putting in the work is where we can shape our minds more than our bodies. I work hard to help people transform their bodies, but my biggest successes are when people transform their minds, their views of themselves. A lot of people walk into the studio with hopes of losing a few pounds, or finally fitting into those “skinny” jeans. A lot of people have hopes of six-pack abs and world record PR’s. I don’t want to discourage those goals, because they are usually what gives people the motivation to make a change, a healthy change for their bodies. But I must confess, working out two or three hours a week isn’t going to create huge rewards if your life if the other 100 plus waking hours doesn’t change, or worse those hours sabotages the few spent doing something good.
We show up and put in the work, we increase our strength and we increase our endurance. But usually we are our own worst critic, we view our bodies in the harshest light and the meanest eyes. We forget where we came from and see where we aren’t. Maybe we haven’t gotten our strict push up yet, but our swing is stronger, our run is faster, our smile is bigger. All too often we create our own barriers to success. Most of the time we focus on what we aren’t accomplishing instead of all our successes. Your friends and family aren’t going to care what pant size you wear and they sure as hell aren't going to care if you can’t seem to lose that last 10 pounds. Those close to you are going to care how big your smile is, how tight your hug is. They are going to care if you show up on the bad days and you throw down on the good days.
Our training needs to reflect ourselves. We need to look at who we are and build our fitness routines around that person. We need to search for our strengths and truly own them. We need to look for our weaknesses and truly own them also. Comparing ourselves to the person next to us in class isn’t going to get us closer to finding our motivation to stick with an exercise regiment for the long haul. Imagining that we are an athlete on instagram doing a front lever on the subway isn't going to give us the success we need to keep committing to ourselves.
Finding your own reason for showing up is powerful, its personal and its accountability with only yourself. What are you training for? Maybe it’s a half marathon, maybe it’s a personal record, maybe its for positive reasons, maybe it’s for negative reasons. But what if it is to kick ass in life, what if it’s to be the best version of you, to finally see the sexy as fuck person looking back at you in the mirror. The reasons to train don’t always have to be for a ribbon or a finish line.
Training can be the journey. The reasons we train can go so much deeper than what will make a good Facebook post. It can help us find our way through stressful times, it can help us combat depression, it can be a gift that you give yourself. And hopefully they create healthy relationships with yourselves and include unlimited high fives.