Category: Daily

Regardless of how you bake it, reclaiming your energy, strength, and fitness requires you to become uncomfortable.

But ambitious plans fail when challenging, uncomfortable physical and mental feelings exceed our tolerance.

Yet, that’s what most people do when starting a new fitness program. Taking on too much, barely tolerating it, and giving up before having the chance to build it into a habit.

The key to success is to find a level of uncomfortableness that you can tolerate. And then gradually add more as your tolerance increases.

Until one day, you won’t recognise your previous self.

Or, as one of my clients said today, “I may not hate strength training”.

-J

ps. I am taking on four new online coaching clients this week. Are you a tired parentpreneur who:

– Wants to reclaim your energy and strength slowly and sustainably
– Juggles business, parenthood and about a gazillion other roles and responsibilities
– Gives zero f*cks about having abs and doesn’t want to focus on weight loss or counting calories
– Is willing to carve out 90 minutes a week for improving your health and fitness

If reading that makes at least two of your neck vertebrae sore from vigorous nodding, hit reply. And we’ll have a chat to see if my coaching program would be a good fit.

Going for the extremes is a sign of desperation.

We’re not happy with the situation we are in. And we want to move away from that situation as quickly as possible, often at a rate that’s not sustainable.

In contrast, going slow leads to a more consistent effort. And the more consistent we are, the less appealing the extremes become.

-J

This is the opposite of what we’ve been told to do.

The typical response to uncomfortable feelings is to ignore them. To grind through. Hoping that we can kill these feelings with sheer tyranny of will.

But ignoring uncomfortable, challenging feelings doesn’t make them go away. They get pushed to the side. They pile up.

And once the pile gets high enough, it’ll collapse back on us.

Instead of pushing through, stop. Let the feeling come in. Sit with it. Get to know it. Recognise what you feel.

Where does it come from? What is it telling you? Giving your full attention to these feelings is how they lose their strength.

And then, you can return to the task at hand.

-J

How do you know those beliefs to be true?

Maybe the beliefs you have only exist in your mind.

Maybe they’re a product of your past actions.

Either way, support the new, more productive belief by taking action that aligns with who you want to be.

-J

That’s one of the first things Mary* said to me when she signed up for coaching.

She was in her late 30s and a decade and some change postpartum. And she had been dealing with pelvic floor issues and incontinence ever since. Besides jumping, she also had to rush out of bed to make it to the toilet in time, among other things.

The story isn’t how she’d been trying to fix her pelvic floor issue but couldn’t. Nope.

She hadn’t done anything about it, thinking some form of incontinence is given once you give birth. During that decade after giving birth, no one told her she didn’t have to live with a weak pelvic floor for the rest of her life.

I learned about her struggles because we discussed her training and health history during the first coaching week—the things she liked and didn’t like. And the jumping and incontinence came up.

I am not a pelvic floor specialist, so we found a pelvic floor physiotherapist for Mary near where she lived. And the appointments with the therapist and the homework she prescribed made all the difference to Mary’s confidence in exercise, getting to the toilet on time and most importantly, her quality of life.

So, if you’re living through a similar story right now, this is a reminder to reach out to a pelvic floor specialist for help.

You can decide how your story ends.

-J

*Not her real name.

An underappreciated aspect of having a solid grasp of health principles?

You’re comfortable sitting on your seat, eating popcorn, while others go nuts about the latest health trend.

You’re waiting to see if whatever everyone’s losing their minds (and money) about is worth joining.

Because once most circuses leave town, you might as well stay seated and order more popcorn for the next show.

-J

When we’re so focused on the shoulds and should-nots of lifestyle change, it’s easy to forget how crucial the environment is for building new habits.

Setting a kettlebell next to your work desk.

Not storing biscuits in the house every single day of the week. Especially Anzac biscuits.

Putting your runners near the front door.

Keeping veg in the fridge/cupboard/freezer.

Having a water bottle on your desk.

Hiding your phone to stay present with the kids and not scroll in bed.

It’s as cliche as they come, but out of sight, out of mind is a legit rule for life.

We just need to know which things to hide and what deserves all the possible visibility.

-J

Your track record of starts and stops trying to improve your health and fitness isn’t a sign of failure.

But a representation of your determination.

The more tries you rack up, the closer you’ll get to it finally clicking.

-J

When I first started going to the gym, it felt more like necessarily evil than love at first sight. My friends and I spent most of our workouts between finding excuses not to do something and counting the minutes until we could bolt the fuck out of the bright-lighted, ammonia-scented basement of misery.

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what to do because, as a 16-year-old, I thought I already knew everything (I didn’t. Shocking.) No, I didn’t like training because I found the repetitive nature about as enjoyable as the idea of opening a tin of tomatoes with my eyelids. That, and I was dealt with pretty average genetics for training, which meant that results came in sloooooooooooooooow.

When I’d finish a workout, I was uncomfortably relieved I didn’t have to do it again for another day or two. I think we all were.

But for reasons I lack the imagination to understand, I kept at it somewhat regularly for the next seven years. If not entirely hating it, tolerating it just enough to keep showing up.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that I started to enjoy training. Maybe it just wore me out, and I gave in. (And then I went too deep the other way, but that’s a different story.)

To this day, along with learning to read and not being an asshole (most of the time), training is one of the most important skills I’ve ever learned.

Today, twenty-something years later, training is integral to my life. One of the few things that keeps me sane. Even if my current training ambitions and the time I can commit to them are a shadow of what they used to be.

Maybe those are the very reasons I enjoy it so much. Or perhaps it’s because my goals are more internal vs external. Or because I am able to train at home.

Anyway. Just because you don’t like strength training now doesn’t mean that you won’t in the future. I can think of many current and past clients who stuck with it and now enjoy the process and its benefits. Which now makes me realise how I should’ve written this post about one of them instead of myself. But there is zero chance of me starting this again, so we’re all stuck with what I’ve already written.

Here’s where it’s at.

Eventually, we can learn to tolerate, even gasp! horror! blasphemy! love the things we loathe.

I mean, none of us always loved cauliflower, either.

-J

Successful lifestyle change is rooted in kindness. Kindness towards yourself.

To have the empathy and understanding to not beat yourself up about missing a workout, having too many pinots or eating Ben & Jerry’s for dinner because you got carried away by the intricacies of quantum mechanics.

After all, progress is about learning to co-exist with healthy and unhealthy choices.

At the same time, it’s possible to be too kind towards yourself. When that happens, frequent excuses start to slip in—deterring you from following through with the things that matter to you.

Unlike with most things, the answer to the right amount of kindness isn’t somewhere in the middle.

Instead, lean into kindness as heavily as you can. Tune into your inner dialogue to notice when it becomes a hindrance instead of an ally.

-J