Hate or Love… What motivates you?
Why do you choose to workout? If you’re like most people you do it for aesthetic or cosmetic reasons. Chances are there is a part or parts of your body you aren’t happy with and this is the motivation behind your training.
Maybe you don’t like your legs or your belly or your arms? Your workout plan will likely target these areas…and this is exactly what fitness “professionals” tell you to do. They’ll say things like —
“What are your target areas? Here are some exercises to work on those areas!”
This method and process is simply WRONG. At face value this doesn’t sound like a bad approach, however, exercising because you HATE something about yourself will eventually cause you to make decisions which may not be beneficial for your long term physical and mental health. There is a big difference between exercising because you hate your body versus exercising because you love your body.
Think about it this way, someone who trains because they hate their body tends to punish themselves in the gym. If they hate the way their legs look then they are hammering their legs relentlessly, over applying intensity and picking exercises that may not be the best choices for long term success. If they have a “bad” day of eating they may go to the gym the next day to make up for it. They treat their body poorly in the gym because their motivation comes from hate.
Someone who trains because they love their body has a completely different approach. Their training motivation comes from wanting to take care of their body. The workouts, exercise selection and intensity tends to be appropriate rather than simply intense all the time.
In the short term, motivation from hate can be very strong but over time it leads to injury, illness and inconsistency in training. It is NOT a great long term approach. All you have to do is look around for evidence of this. There is no shortage of people who hate how they look. It simply does not work.
Imagine going into the gym thinking “I love this body I was blessed with. And I want to take care of it because I love it.” This approach is very successful in the long term because your workouts are far more likely to be proper regardless of situation. Feeling kind of stiff? The person that hates their body will ignore this signal and will just beat themselves up in the gym because they hate the cellulite on their legs. The person that loves their body will heed the signal and stretch instead.
Now ask yourself the following question…who owns your body? Are you doing a good job loving it? If not, then now is the time to start loving it and the rest will fall into place.
