How to be a regular Exerciser

Photo: Akuzawa Minoru demonstrates his body control and balance with the assistance of a heavier partner



Whether or not you are motivated by sport, the condition of your body makes a big difference on your daily experience, your health, and how well you perform in other areas of your life.

On top of the actual experience of enjoying a well conditioned body, there is also a host of statistical evidence that positively relates regular moderate exercise to health. It makes sense to exercise.

At the same time many people do not exercise regularly. I am not going to ask why not? That question has the wonderful effect of helping entrench people in their reasons 'why not.'

Rather I am going to to go over some of the mental strategies that regular exercisers use.

1. Enjoy exercise
Enjoyment and pleasure is a state, an attitude. There are certain kinds of exercise that are probably beyond my ability to do, so I will not do them. However there is plenty within my range that I can do safely, and at a level of effort that is not simply excruciating.

Then I can simply take satisfaction in the fact that I am doing the exercise.

I was talking to a fellow coach recently who has gone through a revolution in her attitude to exercise. She used to be overweight and started to see a personal trainer, and is now light and happier.

She stopped seeing the trainer regularly (a good trainer, like a good coach seeks to make themselves redundant after a short time) and someone asked her if she was still doing her exercises. She replied with a smile 'Yes I am, and I shall continue to do them for as long as I'm living' .

Then she explained ' I used to see slim people running, and I'd wonder if they are slim why do they have to run? Now I understand, it is because they run that they are slim.'

Incidentally this transformation took place when she was in her sixties.

Health and fitness are as much processes as goals. You do not stop doing them because you have 'arrived'. If they are a process that you continue through your life you may as well enjoy it.

2.Take pleasure in physical effort
This is an interesting illustration of how the way we interpret physical sensation determines our attitude to a situation.

When people who do not enjoy exercise train any effort is considered tortuous misery. Effort is proof of how unfit they are, and possibly a reminder of childhood humiliation. I was the last to be picked for the team as well, I know that feeling.
When people who like to exercise train the sensation of effort remains the same, however the interpretation changes. Exercisers link effort with their goals. Effort is proof that they are moving in the direction of how fit they would like to be, and thus becomes a source of satisfaction, even in the moment that it is happening.

An extreme example of this is the saying 'Pain is weakness leaving the body.' It is probably a little too extreme for me though.

3. Get curious about movement and the body
The body is wonderfully complex. There are so many possibilities of movement, and these link in to your mental state. You can never exhaust the possibility of learning from movement.

Moshe Feldenkrais distinguished between two kinds of exercisers. One kind equates exercise with raw effort. The harder you exercise, the better it is. The second type gets curious about how relaxed and efficient they can be when they move.

The first type tends to perform poorly, get injured, and create muscle imbalances across their bodies. When you see them run there is lots of movement, but not much speed. The result is that they try harder. As they age they accumulate bad habits.

The second has a sense that they can always improve their performance, that they can relax a little more, become slightly more efficient, slightly more graceful. So they constantly pay attention to how they are moving, how their body works. In this refinement they have many opportunities for enjoying the sheer flowing pleasure of movement.

For this reason I do not like health clubs with their habit of distracting people from what they are doing using music and video. It is the possibility of improving the quality of an exercise through attention that makes it interesting.

Take a Yoga or Taiji class where the exercise is slowed down enough to really put the mind into the body. That way you can make distinctions between different ways of doing the same external movement.

If you do not know what I'm talking about find someone with some skill and enthusiasm for movement and get invite them to share their fascination with you.

In making these kinds of changes you can explore all kinds of possibilities for physical pleasure. Yes, you can read that last statement in any way you like.

Being able to make distinctions in physical movement/sensation is also a great way of increasing emotional intelligence and sensitivity.

4. Use a mix of motivations
You can motivate yourself towards what we want or away from what we do not want.

As a competitive martial artist I used to live in a unspoken arms race with my my classmates. If we let the others get fitter or more skilled than us, then we would be literally beaten. It was a good motivation strategy - we worked hard to escape black eyes and humiliation. But it was also stressful, partly because there is always someone bigger, fitter and possibly more skilled who could well hit you.

A more reasonable away from is to move away from the bad feelings associated with being unhealthy and out of shape.

I have also motivated myself towards what I want, whether that is the image of me looking a particular way, or feeling a particular way, or receiving a particular compliment on how you look or perform.

Personally I believe that health and fitness are much more of a feeling than a look. So for me appearance is more a result of something deeper than an end in itself, however ripped and glossy the images in the fitness magazines are.

These days I picture myself blissfully freediving, having longer to enjoy the wonders of the ocean, and that makes me want to cycle faster climb more stairs and work harder on my circuits.

Another motivation is the way exercise and food relate. I like food, and food tastes better when you are really physically hungry. Therefore exercise is a way of enjoying food more. More accurately it is a way of enjoying more food more!

Comparisons with yourself and others can be motivating sometimes, but not always. I know people who I will probably never be as fit as, and also I probably won't be as fit as I was when I was a professional martial artist. If I compare myself to those times I risk being disheartened.

However if you compare yourself to some standard that you consider both possible, and worthwhile, then it can help get you going. The good thing about this is that as you reach one goal, then you may believe another is possible.

The expense of a health club membership does not work for many people as a motivation. think it is better to cut out the middle man and go straight to a personal trainer if you have the money to spend.

5. Integrate it into your life
Do you mind if I have another rant about health club culture...I used to cycle to a club I taught in that was couple of miles outside of a small town. I would be passed by a number of cars that I would find in parked a few minutes later. The people in the cars would be on stationary bikes, peddling away. It is the same with people who use stair machines and then take lifts. Not the most efficient use of time or energy.

Life presents all kinds of opportunities for mild to moderate exercise, whether stairs, carrying objects, using your body as a means of transport - cycling, walking, jogging. The latter can save you money, not to mention cut down on CO2 emissions while getting you fitter.

Considering it only takes 10 seconds to for an Olympic athlete to totally exhaust themselves in a sprint, exercise need not take a long time. Ten or fifteen minutes here and there can maintain a reasonable fitness level, boost metabolism and mental function. Even busy people can fit that in.

I have a friend who decides he will have a press up day. He sets a timer to go off every 40 minutes or so, and when it does he finds a place where he can (relatively) discretely pump out a set of press ups. He treats it like a game. You could even invite people to join in!

You can also integrate exercise with being sociable, dancing, playing football. When I lived in Taiwan people gathered in parks for all kinds of exercise, in the early morning and also in the evening. You could see ballroom dance, hip-hop, aerobics, and martial arts. You can also find people training in the wide corridors of shopping centres and underpasses.

They would also spend a chunk of that time chatting and getting to know each other. The younger ones would be displaying themselves to members of the opposite sex too. Exercise is very much built into that culture.

There are scores of opportunities for integrating exercise into your life, and if you have some influence you can make it easier for other people around you at the same time.


So whether you are have a long neglected sport, or never liked sports the key to regular exercise in attitude that it can be enjoyable, that effort is itself a pleasure, and that there are always a opportunities for both practise, and improvement.

I have deliberately not gone into the technicality of exercise, just the attitudes that sustain it. If you are already a regular exerciser and have some other attitude that you would like to add to this then I'll be happy to read it.

In the mean time train well and have fun!

Habits

We all have habits, we cannot get by without them. The question is whether the habits we have serve us or not. The next question is how to change a habit?

Read on…

Paris Sans Clopes – the energy of habit

Xmas xcess and rich pickings for a coach

How to be a regular Exerciser

Xmas xcess and rich pickings for a coach

In my previous life as a personal trainer in Paris one of my busiest times of year used to be January. I dealt with people who had gone overboard at Christmas. Having hauled themselves away from another scene of culinary carnage, weighed down by foie gras, good wine and a rich heritage of cheese they examine their lives with a faint feeling of nausea. Unable to move they had no choice but to reflect back on the previous year. On January 1st it’ll be time to change….

Actually things are not so different for me since I gave up the physical fitness side of my practise. People still get overdo it over xmas and want help to see the coming year in a new way, which often involves discussion and the putting together of plans with dreams or values.

I consider myself a good coach – that is I aim to do my job well and thus put myself out of a job pretty quickly. If the above scenario seems familiar to you and undesirable then read on as I plan to put myself out of a job.

Our perceptions of things and the decisions we make are state related. In a state of toxic overload it’s a lot harder to look at your life and feel good, resourceful and able to cope with challenges than after some exercise. I am not about to start praising the virtues of brisk walks, and bracing cold baths in the mornings – but I think you get the point..

So in preparation for Xmas here is a mental strategy you can apply in all sorts of activities, and works especially well with food. When you are choosing to do something expand the time frame of your decision . Whether it’s eating, asking for cigarette, staying up all night with that Calvados you brought back from Deauville. Don’t just think of how good it will as you relish the texture and the aroma of each mouthful. Think longer term. How will you feel just after you’ve eaten or drunk. Extend the time frame along to January 1st when you look at yourself in the mirror, or stand on the scales, or pull on your favourite jeans.

If you like the way you’ll feel longer term then go for it. If not choose something that you will feel good after.

Of course for this strategy to work well you have to start by feeling good. If you feel awful already then what’s just one more moelleux au chocolat?

So in the run up to Xmas make sure you do things that make you feel good, and keep doing them through the festive season. My choice is martial arts and meditation – but you’ll know what helps you feel light, clear and in tune. The idea is to feel so good from healthy activity that the tempting but unhealthy things simply lose their appeal. I recognise they feel bad in comparison.

So try it out, have a great Xmas and do not call me in January!

Paris Sans Clopes – the energy of habit

Now if you are reading this outside of France the title of this post may not make much sense to you. Pretty much everyone knows what Paris is, but 'les clopes?' Clopes is colloquial French for cigarettes, and smoking (verb: cloper – to smoke). In February France follows America, Ireland, Holland, Norway, Montenegro and many other countries in introducing legislation to prohibit smoking in many public places.

Now the change in France is not going to happen overnight. Café’s and bars have a year’s grace period to adjust. But why am I writing about this in an NLP Blog? Well smoking is such a universal, experience and such a good example of a unwanted habit that we often use it as an example to illustrate certain NLP principles. So now that a whole country is aiming to get healthier I’ll take advantage of it here.

We use smoking as an example because there are a lot of people who want to stop smoking, but find it hard. One reason they find it hard is because they start off with a badly formed outcome in mind. They want to not do something. Well formed outcomes are stated something positive to be, do or have.

Wannabe non-Smokers are also at war with themselves. They usually have a string of reasons for smoking as long as their arms. But they are rarely aware of more than just a few of their reasons to smoke.

These are what we call the positive intentions of smoking, and typically include having a treat, having a break, punctuating the day, a way to start a conversation and part of a sense of identity. People often say that they are smokers, they define the world between smokers and non smokers.

If they do not address these positive intentions then in stopping smoking they find themselves missing out on a whole host of what makes life good for them. They don’t know how to have those intentions can be fulfilled in all sorts of different ways.

Not only do they have all these hidden reasons to smoke, they also have a lot of beliefs about smoking. Nicotine is very addictive, giving up is hard, and each time they light up after a period of laying off they consider themselves to have failed.

So now France is in the same position as many of those people. Smoking is (decreasingly) a part of the French national identity. Many Café’s have a tabac, a counter where there is whole range of tobacco products on sale – as well as stamps and lottery tickets. For many people sitting at the zinc counter of a café, ordering a coffee and lighting up a cigarette (perhaps a Gauloise) is a quintessentially French activity.

That is all under threat. That part of French culture is going to die, and people on the tobacco side of it are nervous.

Personally I’m curious. Not just curious, I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be great to be able to drop off my daughter at school, and have a cup of tea in café which has clean air. I’ve seen it happen before in other countries, in houses and households, and I've liked he results.

But when you are on the other side of that change, it can see strange and daunting. Like going from childhood to adolescence, or adolescence to adulthood.

Paris has already started though. I see a smaller proportion of people who smoke, and a general cleaning up of the city. For example there is much less dog mess on the street than when I moved here 6 years ago. Not that I want to draw any parallel between dog shit and cigarettes for the smokers among you. I mean what would you want to clean first, your fingers or your lips? Please don't think about that whenever you see a cigarette, it might spoil your pleasure.

The reality is that this kind of change can be easy. There are moments that people recognise that something does not fit their sense of identity, that they have moved on and the old ways are no longer necessary.

People readjust their actions when they examine their values. I know that when I stopped smoking one reason was I didn’t want to pay my money to companies with a long history of deliberately lying to sell damaging drugs to large sections of the population. What’s the word for those people? Scumbags I think.

No, that’s not very compassionate of me. People knowingly trying to hook other people on carcinogenic chemicals aren’t really murdering scumbags. They are just misguided and doing their best to make a living. Just like arms dealers, and the rest of us embedded in a society that invests money in destructive unsustainable activities. At what point do people own up to what they are doing as wrong?

But rather than getting all angry – which sometimes is justified and a useful motivator, we can also turn towards something more positive.

Something else that helped me leave cigarettes in my past was having something else that I really wanted to do. Once I discovered freediving I lost all desire to smoke. Images of myself playing in the ocean wiped out any temptation. We all have dreams that can motivate us.

Someone at a French NLP training I attended recently gestured to a non-smoking sign. It was the usual crossed out cigarette. He stated that there was no other way of giving the message of no smoking.

I disagree. Representing a positive goal that is not compatible with the unwanted activity would work. So a picture of blue skies, or mountains, or a windswept ocean with the words ‘keep the air clean’ or ‘enjoy a breath of fresh air’.

So you may not smoke, and you may not live in Paris – if you do both of these then you might think of visiting Mike Fink (Mike's site is in French and he also works in English). But you may have some activity or habit that gets in the way of what you really want to do.

When you talk with someone who admits that they want to give up their habit, it can be helpful to motivate them to change by kicking their ass, by pointing out the negative consequences of continuing as they are.

I also find that it’s helpful to recognise that even scumbags have reasons to do what they do. If I am going to help them find a new way forward I’d better have a sense of how to incorporate those reasons into any new plan, or way of being. It’s bit like blending with and using people’s force in martial arts. It makes life easier, less violent and takes the existing energy and channels it in a new direction.

So where might you have some energy that could use re-channelling? It may not be a conventional bad habit like smoking. It could be something as subtle as thinking negatively. Then the next question is, once you have freed that energy where would you like to see yourself put it?