power of slow growth – patience, perseverance, belief in self

I’m over 2 years into working out as a lifestyle. To me, working out as a lifestyle means that I don’t have an end goal. I set short, medium, and long term goals the same as other things, however, once I finish a goal, I almost immediately start a new one. It also means that I’m constantly working it into my normal habits with things like stretching, sleeping, and eating intentionally, but I’ll get to that more later.

One thing that keeps me coming back to working out is being able to see the power of consistency and time. No matter how bad the training felt, since I’m over 2 years in, it’s still much more productive than how it felt to work out compared to when I first started. This reminds me how much I can improve if I simply keep repeating the action in small timeframe (hours), but multiply it by a larger timeframe (months/years). It also reminds me of how much I struggled to do things that I can easily do now, and that the struggle has been a part of each skill I learned.

The power of slow growth also naturally builds belief in the self. Especially when things take a long time to work for it, that work builds the belief that I CAN. This belief only works well when you as an individual put in the work to pursue goals. And it’s felt that simply by trusting in the long term and setting challenging goals that I was able to believe in myself more. It’s simple, but still hard to continue doing on a daily basis.

pushing and testing limits – seeing I’m capable of more. building confidence through action

Through working out as a lifestyle, I’ve also learned a lot about pushing and testing my limits. After learning about David Goggins and his story, I was forced to question how I’d been setting my limits. I’d obviously been setting them too low. From there, most of my ‘training’ became setting a basic goal for each session, and slowly pushing past the point when my mind is ready to quit. Sometimes it’d make me want to quit by overwhelming the feeling of physical pain signals. Other times, it reminded me over and over of embarrassing things I’d done to make me want to psychologically quit. After seeing it enough, I was prepared to find ways to keep going through the pain just a little bit more each time.

Each small win pushing past the quitting mind inspires me to go a little further the next day. Day by day, these results are tiny, but since I can look back a couple years now I can see the massive improvement. And most of it relates to confidence. In the past, my mind would find ways to quit way too early in the process. I would decide I could never be good at something within the first few weeks of trying it. The whole time I was capable of it, I just didn’t have my mind and body working together. Now that I see the power of consistent effort, there are a lot more things I challenge myself to do, because I know it’s always possible if I have enough time.

impacting other areas of life – how principles of recovery help me in other areas

One thing I learned early on in this lifestyle is that getting hurt is a worst case scenario. When you’re pushing your body 4-6 days a week, it’s easy for inefficiencies and mismanagement of time and energy to lead to injuries which keep you out of training. ‘It’s about keeping up a championship pace, for life’ – David Goggins.

After my first few injuries, I quickly began experimenting with my diet and recovery habits. I stopped drinking alcohol altogether for the first 2 years, replacing nearly everything with water. I learned about nutrition and diets like Whole-food, plant based and their impact on athletes. I built a stretching routine that I still continue to develop. I realized how big of an impact sleep was having on my recovery and energy levels. All together, it’s come to a point where simply because working out is such an important part of my life, many other areas of my life are supporting it. When I’m making choices throughout the day, I often think about how it impacts my next workout. If I stay up late won’t it hurt my workout tomorrow? I’m feeling a bit sore, I need to get a few stretches in. I’m planning on working out in the afternoon, so I need to eat enough calories before I leave to power me through the workout.

I still regularly have tweaks or energy issues, I just move a lot quicker from the negative emotion to solution than I used to.

As you can see, working out as a lifestyle has tremendously changed things in my life, and my goal for this post was to help working out seem more accessible and inspire anyone thinking about it to just go for it.