Is Your Training “All or Nothing”?

Are you flexible and adaptable with your fitness routine?

Or do you fall off the wagon completely when it can’t be followed to the “T”?  

This is a conversation that has come up numerous times during this lockdown as so many of us have gone without access to our gyms and equipment…

And it’s left a lot of us feeling unmotivated and generally frustrated at our inability to follow our regular workout plans. 

 What I’ve heard many times over the past four months has been the following:

“If I can’t train the same way I’m not motivated to do anything.”

Hands up if this thought has entered your mind over the past for months (I know it has for me!)

This is the “all or nothing” mindset that tends to creep into our psyche when things don’t go our way.

This lockdown has for many of us shown our inability to adapt and adjust our training routines when life throws us a curveball.  And this all or nothing mindset can actually be more detrimental to our health than we may think; here’s why…

If your goal is to have fitness be a part of a long-term healthy lifestyle, the reality is things are going to come up in life along the way that will throw you off balance.  As much as we would like the think our fitness is just a straight linear progression, it actually looks more like a bunch of peaks and valleys.

The more we are able to accept this reality, and keep ourselves focused on the long-term process and not short term outcomes, the better we are able to adapt and adjust our fitness routines to life circumstances that are largely out of our control.

Instead of thinking “I’m going to lose all my gains, I give up!” we can get creative and ask, “How can I adapt my training so it may still benefit my health?”

If however, we resist this reality, what we end up doing is piling more stress on an already stressed system.  We may do this physically, by continuing to push ourselves with hard workouts day in day out when what we may really need is less intensity, less frequency or volume. 

Or we may do this mentally by punishing and shaming ourselves for not ‘sucking it up’ and training anyway.  

At the end of the day, this lockdown has provided us the opportunity to look at our relationship with exercise, aim to become more adaptable with our fitness, be more aware of how other lifestyle factors affect our training, and then calibrate accordingly so it may continue to support our health instead of detracting from it.

How about you? Is this something that you struggle with?