“Your body can stand almost anything. It’s your mind that you have to convince.”
“Fitness is like a relationship. You can’t cheat and expect it to work.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they worked on it every single day!”
So many fitness quotes and phrases seem to be geared towards struggle and hard work. It’s this philosophy of pushing past the pain, sticking to it even when it’s hard, and refusing to give up or give in until you reach your goal. My own personal fitness journey mirrors that of many other women I know: periods of absolutely no exercise and eating whatever I want, interspersed with shorter, intense periods of working out regularly and subscribing to a regimented diet or nutrition plan. I was able to make huge gains that way, but they weren’t sustainable.
A great way to tell if your exercise is boosting your wellness is how you feel while you're doing it! Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash
For me, working out every day and sticking to a list of foods I can and can’t eat in certain quantities is not how I want to live my life. So when I picked up a new training plan for my first marathon (AH! I’ve gone crazy!) it was important to give myself leeway and flexibility. I found that out the hard way in my third week of training. I’d stuck to every single scheduled run. Long runs, medium runs, fast runs, all of them! And then one day while I was stretching I felt a pop in my foot. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t painful. But I remember thinking “this is a message. If I ignore it, it will get worse.”
I took a path I’m not particularly practiced on: I “gave up”. I took a week of rest, and did some research on running forums about the particular pain I was experiencing. It turns out that running in old shoes, or shoes that were the wrong shape, were probably causing the pain. Or running too much too soon. Or just the shape of my foot. Options for treatment, if it got worse, would be surgery or no more running. I took it slow when I started back up, got new shoes that fit better, and started listening to my body.
Injuries happen more often when our bodies are tired and not working efficiently. They happen more often when our muscles are tense and tight. Super-intense athletic activity can lead to injury, more often than not, that eventually ends enjoyment of the sport that caused it.
If your primary goal is to stay well and mobile and happy into your old age, then you need to slow down sometimes and listen to what works in your body. You need to have the humility to understand that sometimes when it seems like you’re too tired to work out, you actually ARE too tired to work out. If it seems like your daily yoga classes are triggering your knee injury, that might be exactly the case. You need to ask yourself: When is sticking to a fitness goal compromising my overall wellness?
My new training plan is based on time instead of distance, and my heart rate. There are still days when the run is harder than others, but since I know starting out how long I’ll be running, regardless of distance, I never feel rushed to pick up the pace. I have more room to pay attention to what’s happening in my body. I enjoy my runs now, and I know when I want to skip a run, it’s not because I’m lazy. It’s because my body needs that extra rest.
Wellness isn't just intentionally working. It's intentionally relaxing, too!
Photo by Haley Phelps on Unsplash
So how can you build your fitness routine into a wellness routine?
1. Set a goal that’s unique to you
Instead of aiming for a pace or a distance or an objective goal, like 50 repetitions, aim for “as much as I can do in x minutes”, and then be gentle with yourself. If you need to slow down, slow down. If you need to stop, stop. Instead of measuring your progress against an objective goal, measure your progress against your last month’s progress. Or, better yet, don’t measure your progress at all! Just pay attention to how you feel when you’ve done some physical activity versus how you feel when you don’t!
2. Incorporate a relaxation practice.
Stressing and straining your body on a regular basis should be counterbalanced with resting and relaxing your body on a regular basis. This can be a meditation practice, gentle stretching, or restorative yoga, or even a hot bath! Whatever you do to relax your body, try to do it as frequently as you would do your training or strenuous activity. For example, if you run 3 days a week, do your relaxation practice 3 days a week as well. Better yet, you can incorporate rest and work into one session, like a yoga class that balances strength with ease, or a jog that mixes running with walking. Having just one rest day in a week of hard work is about as realistic as pulling all–nighters all week and just sleeping on weekends.
3. Practice listening to your body.
Our body sends signals that we can pick up if we’re paying attention. Soreness, pain, thirst, hunger, exhaustion: all of these are clues that your body needs more support. If you ignore and push through when the signals are quiet, your body will send you a louder signal that will be harder to ignore. These can sometimes be pretty devastating, and might end up with you stuck on the couch for much longer than you planned. So get curious about what your body is telling you: Where could that soreness be coming from? Why am I so tired? What do I need more of? Less of? Basically, start listening and responding to these cues from your body instead of tuning them out.
By setting your own subjective goals, prioritizing relaxation as much as exercise, and listening to the messages your body sends you can start moving away from just fitness and toward a more sustainable wellness journey!