Your wake-up shake-up
Everyone’s pain threshold is different when it comes to exercise and recovery. The more unfit you are, the more pain you will experience post workout.
This is one of the main reasons why people give up exercising. They get out of the starting blocks too quickly without proper progression and then they can’t walk for days. What happens to your muscles when they are unfit and what daily interventions can you do to reduce the pain?
Take both your hands and spread your fingers open and wide followed by interlocking them together. Make sure they are still straight. Now, slide them back and forth with ease. This is an example of how your muscles contract and relax when engaged and moving.
Squeeze your fingers tight, pushing against the other interlocking fingers and proceed to move your fingers back and forth. The resistance in efficiency of moving back and forth is not there.
When you add weight, load, tempo and frequency to the contractions, moving back and forth, it causes friction and heat. The more you exercise, the more efficient this process becomes and can handle more stress placed on it. It is like anything in life, when you start something new, it is difficult but over time, it becomes easier and typically requires less energy for the same output.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of personality, the pleasure principle, helps drive behaviour but it is somewhat never satisfied. As human beings our decisions are based on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The minute you start your journey of exercising like a hike up a mountain for the first time or a 5km jog and the next two days you can’t walk, you are more reluctant to want to do it again anytime soon.
This is why we start out slow and build up rather than being a “flat-out, no-holds-barred weekend warrior” which will only lead to possible injury due to the avoidance of exercise for an entire week because you are so stiff and sore.
One of the main reasons people in their mid-years avoid exercise is because they probably start their days off with aches and pains. Backs, hips, sore feet and shoulders are screaming “eina” when you get out of bed. This triggers the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of further pain. You rationalise to yourself. If you train, it might increase the pain so a “better safe than sorry” approach it is, and your self-justification talk wins.
This is the single biggest hinderance I believe stopping people from exercising in the morning which believe it or not, is the best time to get a workout in. The question remains: how do we move these obstacles out of the way so that it puts you on a path to training in the morning?
First up, change the way you think about exercise and focus on the game plan. The game plan is to try and get you to reduce your aches and pains so you start building from the inside out.