HONOR YOUR WORKOUT TIME

November 19, 2007

Deciding on when you’re going to exercise, making the commitment and being loyal to the time you’ve chosen, is, by far, the hardest part of getting movement into your life.

There is always another level of busy

We work all day and have commitments, either ours or our children’s, every evening. By the time you’re home, there are dishes and supper, homework, laundry. Thinking about adding exercise to the list seems ridiculous. You barely have time to sit on the couch, let alone think you’re going to jump up and down for an hour.

Still, it nags at you that this is so important. It irritates you that so many other women find time for it, and their lives are just as full as yours. In fact, it’s the women with the fullest lives who do get movement in. It’s a huge part of how they keep up, do more, and do it better.

Movement for confidence : a simple exchange

Most deeply, you know that you will never become the person you’re reaching towards without fitting this in. Your consciousness begins to speculate on the concept of your potential, which previously had been deeply buried. You can get through a day, or even a year, without ever coming face-to-face with thinking about the promise that is latent in you.

But why? Why would you let life be like that? Just driving, and laundry, and birthday parties, and ignoring the world of possibility. The confidence you will draw on to make the changes that will take you from where you are to where you will go, can be found in movement. It’s right there in front of you. You do one, you get the other in exchange. It’s that simple. It works for everyone.

Hip-hop with the kids, Yoga without them

We’ve talked about starting gradually in this post called Movement Is Not About Weight Loss. Aim for once a week at the beginning.

Don’ t tell me you can’t find 30 minutes once a week. No one will buy this. If you really are that busy, then you are destroying yourself. Your kids don’t want it or need it and your job is not worth it.

Your kids can be trained to leave you alone. Get them a video they can only watch while you exercise. Make the consequences a little more serious. My kids now walk by and say “Work it, mommy, work it”. If I’m doing kicks, they’ve learned to wait. It took awhile for them to get over the words “Squeeze the buttocks” without falling into hysterics, but they got over it.

In my post Home Is A Great Place To Work Out, you can read about a great place to find videos on stretching, walking, dance, hip-hop, and a lot more. They are available in any length or level of difficulty. You may have bought some 20 or 30 minute DVD’s with easy choreography.

We teach others how to treat us

WE teach others how to treat us.

We TEACH others how we want to be treated.

We teach others how we WANT to be treated.

Be patient with your family. It’s not the 30 minutes of exercise that will get them a little agitated, it’s the perception of the change in you that they will now have to adjust to. They like you the way you are because that’s how they used to interacting with you.

A you that’s more determined and stronger will call on them to watch you a little more carefully to see where you’re going with this, and then to tweak their behavior with you.

Never diminish your resolve. People can smell that kind of weakness. They want to be let off the hook for processing change in themselves. They didn’t ask for this and they don’t want to expend the energy and effort. That’s fine. It’s good for them.

The Nike slogan : Just Do It.

Do not think about it too much beforehand. Don’t make the choice “do I feel like doing this today?”, but rather “which program do I feel like today?”. Lace up your shoes, take your brain to another place, and start.

Set aside a timer for 15min and if you’re really hating it, allow yourself to stop. It takes me between 16 and 22 min to be into it enough to want to keep going.

Choose your music. Set out your clothes and shoes, decide how you’ll be moving the furniture, bring a CD player near your station, let everyone get used to the room’s new look. Set out your weights, inflate the balls, line up the elastic bands. Leave them out where everyone can see them. Treat yourself to a new DVD rack and give it a place of prominence and honor.

Let yourself try

Set this time aside as sacred. Allow everything else to be insignificant in comparison to the importance of getting this time in. Know that you will feel irritable and disappointed in yourself if you give in to yet another excuse, and that you will feel incredibly pleased with yourself when you follow through.

This is not your suffering time. It’s your GROWTH time. YOUR growth time. Your time to be enriched. Your time to feel strong. This is the time when you move your head to the next level of seeing clearly what you can become.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Move Your Body

Comments

2 Responses to “HONOR YOUR WORKOUT TIME”

sonja on March 1st, 2008 2:01 am

I have no problem honoring my workout time. It’s the others in my life who have difficulty with this concept. That is why I go to the gym. No one even talks to me there and there is definitely no one who needs a juice, has a bathroom problem, suddenly would like some soup with fishy crackers, must get me to make a phone call right now, wants to discuss his plans for the week at this particular moment in time…
Christine MS on March 3rd, 2008 7:07 pm

Hi, Sonja,
I’ve been there with you in this. I know this problem. Training the kids is harder than training yourself. First, they don’t want your attention distracted from their needs. Second, kids are naturally drawn to movement. What could be more fun than moving with Mom?
In the beginning, it involved a serious discussion beforehand about what would happen if they interrupted me needlessly. I would make a point of addressing all needs before I began so they knew they still came first.
If they’re not visibly hesitating before interrupting, the discussion has not been clear enough. I had to get angrier than I normally would, angrier than I really felt so they would weigh how badly they needed me at that moment against how hard it might be to wait an hour.
When they were very little, I would keep a special video that they only got to watch while I was exercising so they knew enough to make use of the time.
Like with everything we parents do, kids get used to us and bored by us pretty fast.
As for the need to discuss plans for the week, well, we teach others how they can treat us, … but sometimes it is just so much better to leave the house and go to a place where no one has expectations of you.
On the other hand, you sound like you enjoy the gym and have a good system going there, so why rock the boat?