Alright, you’re out of shape, but committed to a 3 year membership at your neighborhood chain gym. You walk into the doors see the plethora of treadmills, elipticals, bicycles, and you even see something that looks like an escalator- that for some strange reason people pay money to walk up against for 60 minutes. You figure you’ll start out easy so you hop on the bicycle for what seems like hours but is only 5 minutes. Furthermore, the seat’s so uncomfortable you think that when you leave the bike will have to be surgically removed from somewhere. This is where you think to yourself about your favorite foods, and television shows, or that maybe the girl/guy bent over on the escalator thingy will get you through the next 55 minutes you planed to workout. Time goes by and you look up thinking it’s got to be time to go home and then your mind cries“Agh,” because you’ve only spent 15 minutes cycling. You’re sweaty, burning, and you’re not even half way done, furthermore you can feel that tomorrow when you get up for work you’re going to be sore from doing something that was effortless as a kid. You think to yourself… how in the world did I get this out of shape? What am I doing here, and why does life have to be so hard? After an hour passes and you peal yourself off the bike, you vow to never hurt your prostate/ pride like that again, and when you wake up the next morning and can barely get out of bed the gym has officially become the worst place in the world. After two weeks of this you purposely give yourself a day off, which turns into a few years. The next time you think about the gym instead of dreams of grandeur, and a six pack of abs entering you mind, you think to yourself about the last time you were there, and the horrible feelings and inconvenience of it. This is not a good mindset for the future of your life in the gym, but what else are you suppose to do?
That story above is what Cardio does to first timers, but to be honest I don’t know anyone that can do Cardio who’s an avid fitness buff that doesn’t have to have some mentally preparation before doing an hour of gut busting intervals, or a long run. Furthermore I don’t know a fitness buff out there that started out doing cardio and actually liked it. Most of us do it to get ripped for “that time of the year,” or to be- just generally- in good shape. Our motivation for it is not normally, because it’s fun, or because it’s really great to be tired, but we want something and it gets us there. We’re motivated to get our results.
There’s a recent growing pile of research out there that talks about compliance in terms of mere motivation. Motivation is usually thought of as the want or drive to do something, but according to most social psychological texts, motivation is not as clear as the definition might imply. However, what is apparent is that it has two types, external meaning that the drive to do something is coming from something other than yourself- an outside factor (i.e. today you might be motivated to run if your building is about to collapse on you). And internal motivation, meaning that you got an idea and started doing steps to perform it for the mere reason of achieving that goal.
Studies continually illustrate that external motivation lasts even less long than internal motivation- specifically with regard to exercise behavior. In other words if you’ve been working out for 20 years, and it all started with your doctor telling you that you had some sort of problem that exercise would cure, it’s a good bet that you wouldn’t have continued to exercise after the problem went away unless you eventually became internally motivated to get off the couch. Yet I think this begs the question of who cares?
I mean really… who cares if you exercise now due to internal motivation, or because of external motivation? I mean its great concept for professionals to understand, because it helps us to try to move you toward a more willingness participation in exercise so you continue to buy, and so that you continue to work out, which is good for you and us. But in reality if you could come up with a plethora of external motivators for exercise why worry about making yourself internally motivated to exercise.
In other words who cares if your motivation looks like this: it starts off with your doctor telling you, then you get better, then you need to lose weight, then your sport makes you do it, and so on? The fact that matters is that you’re exercising! In essence I don’t think you should worry about having the right type of motivation to work out, just do it, and find reasons along the way; it’s just too hard to want something and continue to want it forever. So don’t want the same thing forever, do the same thing forever, and do it for different reasons- sometimes for external reasons, sometimes for internal reasons, or pick any combination.
With regard to exercise this really works out, because there is merely millions of driving forces that ought to spark your drive to exercise. Prone to falls… exercise. Prone to bone density problems… exercise. Think you look horrible naked… exercise. Feel depressed… exercise. Have a high risk of almost any disease… exercise. Need to live longer… exercise. Are you poor… exer… wait it might not solve that one, but it is noted in many studies that wealthier people tend to exercise more (so maybe we can make the connection, haha). The list obviously goes on, so pick one to focus on, or pick more than one, and get in the gym.
Furthermore since it’s so easy to see reasons outside yourself to exercise you can avoid all the weird confusion and irrationality that can be associated with internal motivation. Cognitive dissonance theory is at the head of the list when I think of why internal motivation gets irrational.
Simply, Cog Diss theory states that in order to stay away from dissonance- incoherent actions and thoughts- you will practically believe anything that backs up your actions. So for instance smokers are more likely to believe that lung cancer is unrelated to smoking cigarettes. Or have you ever had a really hard time choosing between two items of clothing at a store, and then made a random choice, and by the time you got home the thing you bought became far and away the better choice? Think about it people, that shirt didn’t become special on the ride home- your brain had to stay away from dissonance so it subconsciously found reasons to like it more. Whether or not those reasons exist in actuality is debatable. (Another excellent illustration of Cog Diss is that Marathon runners are much more likely to believe that running is the most healthy exercise; runner’s this is to you- there’s nothing special about running just because you do it, except for the fact that you do it).
In other words just because you need to exercise, doesn’t mean you eventually have to like it to the extent that you start doing weird things, like believing bench pressing makes the world a better place. Now I’m not saying embrace the hatred of it either, but why worry about liking exercise? Or finding an activity that you like? Most of us learned how to count, and I don’t remember ever liking that. Furthermore, my mom made me paint redwood furniture when I was a kid once year, and I’m pretty sure I hated that. Liking something, although it is a great indicator of whether or not you’ll do an action, doesn’t have to be indicative of every action you do out of necessity.
It’s a lesson our parents tried to tell us: “life’s hard, and you have to do what you’re supposed to do- whether you like it or not.” Yet as we grew up we substituted more and more suppose to’s with things that were more comfortable/ enjoyable/fun/etc…, and now anything we get to do with our free time somehow has to be enjoyable. In fact many of my clients when they hear how I train ask me, “Do I like torture?” No, of course not! Yeah there are things I like about long stunts of activity with limited food- ( like when I’m finished and I get to chomp down on some pizza), and yeah there are things I enjoy about trying a heavier weight (like knowing 500 pounds won’t crush my spine), but if exercise was bad for me would I miss it- NO! If I could sit all day on the couch watching T.V. to become healthy- why wouldn’t I rather do that? And let me tell you something- there are always weird/crazy people out there who would exercise even if it was bad for them, but if being a couch potato was the route to a better body, heart, mind, etc… you better believe gyms would be out of business, and for that matter probably the whole healthcare field: hell breaking your leg would mean you got to spend more time on the couch. Therefore I’ll augment the old saying for you, “if it was easy to like it, [exercise], the whole world would do it.”
Now why does this apply to Cardio? Well in my experience cardio- although the easiest exercise to do, and by far one of the cheapest, is the hardest exercise to enjoy. And remember that what I mean by Cardio isn’t a walk on the beach during sunset time- if you read my last article you’d know this. Cardio takes an intense commitment to finish, and to progress with. This doesn’t mean that other types of training are easy, but if you wanted to get stronger at bench press, and you weren’t someone who bench pressed for a living, it’d take 10-20 minutes a couple of days per week. Conversely if you wanted to get better at cardiovascular training you can’t have enough activity. I mean let’s be honest running a 12k takes a lot more time to build up to for a beginner than adding 10-20 pounds to practically any lift. Furthermore even if you’re not a beginner, with regard to training for a 12k there is a possibility of overreaching, and thus taking a day off every now and then is advisable, but if you’re trying to get better at bench pressing it’s a must. Conditioning just takes more work more often to progress.
Think about a time when you took a long time off of working out. Yeah, the next day you were feeling it, but the conditioning is what you notice first. If it was a month or a little longer (not years), when you went back to the gym it was probably hard to jump back into 60 minutes on the treadmill, but doing 3 sets of 5-10 was cake- until the next day. Sometimes I notice a decrease in conditioning after a week off, but almost never in strength. Therefore not only does it take a lot more time more often to get conditioned, it’s horrible on your schedule if it’s a priority, because eventually everyone’s got to take some time off, and when you come back the Cardio is almost certainly going to be harder to get going on.
In essence if it’s cardio you’re trying to get better at, you’re going to have to get to the thankless work that you’re supposed to do whether you like it or not; you’re going to have to commit and focus on any motivation you can. I take my friend and my Yoga guru Anthony Chavez’s advice to get through conditioning work, “you just have to live in the moment, and challenge yourself,” or “be wholly present but mentally quite” – which means to me, in non weird yoga terms, go blank and react. And to be honest I use the skills I practice in yoga as well, I link breathing with my movement and I keep breathing in an audible way. When I’m done I thank God a strength session is only a few weeks off, and the next day I go back to work on it.
In life we’ve gotten accustomed to saying and believing things like, “I deserve to do (xyz), because I have to enjoy some of my time- [thinking all the while, “I work all day I just want some time to enjoy life”]. I once had a client of mine tell me, enjoyment and fun are things you get on the way toward accomplishment, and within successful living- not ironically he was speaking about his daughter who was a freshman in college, and how she went wrong. In other words, get to work, and don’t stop. You don’t deserve any special self produced and objectified enjoyment and fun, instead the work you do, and the accomplishments you make provide their subtle yet intense goodnesses; as social psychological research suggests, don’t just smile because you’re happy, but smile to be happy. Cardio is intense work, it takes a lot of time and maintenance, and it’s really hard to like, but it’s daily practice at being the person you’re supposed to be. Becoming this person takes time, patience, and perseverance- all things that are practiced while spending long durations exercising intensely. Therefore if you like your cardio great, if not find something outside yourself that motivates you to do it, because the things you practice while intensely exercising will not only make your body hard, but your mind as well.
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