Jon Murray
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Americans are SCREWED up about fitness

For about a month now, one of my clients had been telling me that people were dying and going to the hospital after taking a spin class. I thought that it was fake news or that it happened to one person who had a history of heart trouble. When I finally ran across the news story on CNN and found out how many and why it was happening. I had to scratch my head and say that as Americans we are Screwed up about fitness.

What do I mean by that you might ask? You might also ask why so strong a word? Well, I am a personal trainer,who has been training since the mid nineties, who is just flabbergasted at how people think or over think there abilities and goals.

Why might you ask am I saying over think. Isn’t thinking good? Yes, but our thinking needs to be informed by our bodies. Our bodies tell the truth about what we are really capable of. It is not our thoughts and evaluations about what we think that we can do. Just because you think you should be able to run a 5k or do a regular push up doesn’t mean you can.

Your body knows what you can do. In extreme cases like someone’s life is on the line or we have train to take our bodies to an extreme place,like running across the Mohave desert, we probably shouldn’t push ourselves to extremes in our workouts.

Now, I am all for a hard workout but we get screwed when we stop listening to our bodies and just go by what we think. We (myself included) can stop listening and that is when the risk versus the benefit of exercise flip. The magic isn’t a class or an specific exercise it is in stimulating our body with fatigue and letting it respond to that.

The beginner and advanced exerciser should be on a journey of self awareness about what his body is capable of. When the body is saying go and when it is saying stop. We need to learn what fatigue feels like and humble ourselves to those signs. We need to forget about what’s others are doing and drop self evaluation for self empathy. It really is about learning to listen and be mindful.

I know because I have been working out since I was eleven years old and have the battle scars to show. I have had chronic back pain, tendinitis in my shoulders, knees that ache so much that I couldn’t sit in a movie theater and those things were happening in my twenties and thirties. Why might I be having these complications ? I injured myself not considering what might body was really capable of. I thought it all was a matter of will power and I just needed to apply more to do what I thought I could do.

The people that my client was telling me about I believe are not listening. They are trying to work through soreness which is really micro-trauma to muscle. That trauma is effecting vital organs and they are having complications that can lead to hospitalization and sometimes death.

Solution: Listen to your body. It has the truth not your head. Practice self compassion; you can get there overnight and it is not a character flaw if you can’t do what everyone else is doing. You will get there because that’s what bodies do if given the appropriate amount of stimulation not to much and not to little. Really and truly the results are out of our hands and in the hands of our DNA or our Higher Power.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade