Don’t push yourself until your workout is torture. It is really important to leave yourself feeling good or you won’t want to go back. For example, if you go to the gym with the goal of doing a 30 minute lifting routine and find that you don’t feel great and really feel like you only have 2 sets of 10 in you instead of 3 sets, that’s okay. If you have done all of the workout except one exercise that you hate and you’re want to be done, that’s okay. If you have done 25 minutes and feel like you’ve had a good workout and are ready to be done, that’s okay. 20 – 25 minutes of good exercise and a good feeling is far better than 30 minutes and leaving with a bad taste in your mouth. Slowly but surely you will start to change your thinking about your workouts. They will go from sucking your will to live to not so bad. Then they might actually be a thing you can learn to enjoy.
Of course we do need to push ourselves enough that we are really getting enough of a benefit out of our exercise. I’m an athlete and a competitive son of a gun. So, pushing myself isn’t so hard. But, my wife, for example sometimes struggles with that. If you do struggle with pushing yourself, don’t think about pushing yourself for longer, just think about increasing your intensity. Think about hiring a good trainer to get you jump started. Or find a workout buddy who is self motivated. You can feed on their intensity as you learn to create your own. Also consider doing intervals. That really worked for my wife. She does interval sprinting on the spin bike (and watches tv while she does it,) and that helps her push to where she wants to be.
This is a lovely segue into the next topic of knowing yourself. Check it out next time.
Standard Disclaimer: In an effort to foil my own perfectionist tendencies, I do not edit my posts much… if at all. Please excuse and typos, mistakes, grammatical errors, or awkward phrasing. I focus on getting my content down. An imperfect post completed is better than a perfect post that goes unposted.