Thanks to Eric Cressey for leading me to this tip from Bill Hartman (one of my co-writers on LiftStrong, Secrets of Female Strength and Conditioning, and Shape Shift):
Warm-up first before you decide you’re going to have a bad workout
The daily grind can wear on you and many times you don’t feel like training. Your attitude will affect the outcome of you workout.
Many times the simple activation of your nervous system with a dynamic warm-up and few warm-up sets will reset your attitude.
Warm-up before you allow your brain to get in the way of what may be the best workout of your life.
Believe it or not, I’m not one of those typical trainers who are addicted to working out. (Sure, things were a little different before kids and mortgages.)
In fact, when I was recently asked for my top tips for personal training success, I said, “Work out only as often as your average client. That will force you to come up with techniques to get the most out of every exercise and every workout.”
You see, it’s easy to get results when you virtually live in the weight room.
It’s a lot harder when you have a life outside of the gym.
However, the bad side of working out three times a week is that there’s only a 3-in-7 chance you’ll exercise on any given day.
Do the math – that’s under 50%. (Trust me, I went to Duke.)
So you wake up every morning less likely to workout.
That pattern can lead to inertia in the wrong direction. You see, exercise follows Newton’s First Law – a body in motion tends to stay in motion…
And a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
Especially after that two-day break – the weekend for Mon-Wed-Fri exercisers, Tuesday and Wednesday for me – my near 50-year-old body really wants to stay at rest.
So here’s what I do when I don’t feel like exercising …
I change my clothes.
On a really rough day, this is literally what goes through my mind …
“Okay, I don’t feel like working out … but I can certainly put on my workout clothes.”
Really, how hard is that?
Don’t you think you can do that, too? Of course you can.
Once I put on workout clothes, it’s easy to hop on my treadmill and turn on the TV for a couple of minutes.
Don’t you think you can do that, too? Of course you can.
No big deal. I still haven’t made a commitment to a “workout.” I’m just watching a little TV. Actively. (If I were even geekier I could label it NEAT.)
I can still stop whenever I want (it’s happened when I’ve been ill or injured and had no business even trying to exercise).
Hmm – what do ya’ know? Once I get a little circulation going, I don’t feel so sore and stiff.
I still haven’t committed, though. It’s not too late to hop on the computer and write a blog post or something.
Now, I follow Bill Hartman’s advice and goof around a little with some weights. A couple of reps of this and that. I would certainly need a shower after this, but it’s far from a “workout.”
Guess what? Not only do I feel better mentally and physically, I’m now at a point where I’m eager to get into a decent workout.
More often than not, as Hartman suggests, it’s not only a decent workout, it’s an excellent workout.
I just had to put a little more effort into the kindling before I could get the big fire.
So take that first step. When you don’t feel like working out, simply start by putting on your workout clothes and turn that negative inertia into positive inertia.
The rest tends to take care of itself.
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