Do you struggle to stay consistent with working out?
Do you find it difficult to find the motivation to exercise?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, keep reading to learn a simple mindset shift to help you finally change the answers to these two questions!
Changing your "relationship" with exercise
To become someone who is able to stay consistent with working out AND stay motivated, you need to change your relationship with exercise. I know that often getting yourself to workout can feel like a struggle, or it feels like another thing that you need to do to check off for the day. We’re going to change this so that you can finally stay consistent with your fitness routine and so that you can start to view exercise as something you enjoy!
The way we’re going to do this is to get you to start to take a holistic approach to working out, something I like to call “holistic fitness”. Stay with me here because I’m telling you, this approach changes everything and is super easy to implement!
Holistic fitness...what does that even mean?
Well, the term holistic basically means that we take into your account our entire being, so our physical body, our mind, and our soul or energy. The reason we would want to become more “holistic” is that by taking care of all parts of ourselves, we can live our happiest and healthiest lives.
You can find a more detailed overview on holistic living by clicking here.
If holistic living is about taking care of our entire being, the body is one of the aspects that we need care for. There are different things that we can do to care for our physical body such as eating nutritious foods, getting enough sleep, and moving the body.
As you may have read in some of my other posts, the body is meant to move. If you look at the anatomy of the human body and all of our joints and muscles, you can see that the human body is designed to move. When we don’t move the body and/or exercise, it’s very difficult to be our happiest and healthiest selves. And when I talk about this, I don’t mean that you need to go run a marathon or do anything crazy for exercise, movement is going to look different for everyone as our bodies are all unique in their own ways.
The body is your vehicle.
The way I like to think about it is that the physical body is what I call your “vehicle.” The physical body contains your soul and is your “vehicle” to interact in this world. I like this analogy for many reasons but the one that goes with this theme is, like you need to care for a car to keep it running optimally, the same goes for the body.
I hope that this has already started to shift your perspective on working out and exercising at least a little bit. The point of exercise isn’t about trying to look a certain way physically, it’s about taking care of your vehicle. Taking care of your vehicle goes deeper than exercise but this is an important part.
Holistic fitness and the mind, body, soul connection
As many of you may already know, the mind, body and soul are always connected. If something impacts one, it will impact the other two. This connection can be used for good. I know sometimes we think about this connection more in the negative sense in the way of if the mind is in a bad place, this will impact the physical body. But vice versa is also true. For example, working on improving the health of the physical body will inevitably start to improve your mental health in some way, even if it’s small.
Based on this connection, start to ask yourself these two questions when choosing a form of exercise:
1- “What makes my soul feel good?”
2- “What makes me feel nourished?”
There are so many ways that you can move your body and exercise, you just have to find what resonates with you and your soul. If exercise is making your soul feel good, you’re way more likely to stay consistent. This is the essence of the concept of holistic fitness.
Let me give you some personal examples so you can understand how this connection can happen.
Example #1: Yoga
One form of exercise I enjoy is movement based yoga.. no surprise.
Yoga fulfills the need of moving my body but, it also helps my mind to feel more calm, it helps me stay in the present moment, and it helps me to connect with my energy. Because of these reasons, yoga makes my soul feel good. So even when I go to do a physical yoga practice, I don’t look at it as “Ugh, I have to do yoga because I have to exercise,” I look at it as, “YAY i get to do yoga!”
Because yoga makes my entire being feel good, which is the essence of this idea of holistic fitness, it’s something that I truly enjoy doing and something that I look forward to.
Example #2: Weight Lifting
So yoga is one mode of exercise for me and I feel like that one is pretty obvious on how it can make your soul feel good but the second form of exercise that I engage in that might not have such an obvious connection is weight lifting.
I’ve been weight lifting for about 6 years and when I started it was to help a hip injury and to make my body “look good”. These two things did keep me motivated to a point but let me share with you how I look at weight lifting now which helps me to stay super consistent.
When lifting weights, I notice that I feel a sense of being empowered and a sense of motivation to take action. These are two important qualities to me as a business owner and two qualities that I feel that I need more often. I tend to be very go with the flow and could use that extra bit of empowered energy to keep me focused on my goals and tasks. The fact that weight lifting can create these feelings and this energy within me is amazing and keeps me very consistent with it. This is also the reason that weight lifting makes my “soul feel good”.
Find what resonates with your soul.
I wanted to share these examples with you to help you to be able see the connections that I have made, but these connections can be made with any form of exercise. If you haven’t found something that has helped make your soul feel good, maybe try something new or try to think about how your energy and mind feels after a specific workout. Looking deeper into how you’re feeling after exercise can help you to uncover this concept of holistic fitness within yourself.
If there was a sport or activity you enjoyed as a child, this could also help you to discover what resonates with you. I was a competitive figure skater up until I was 18 years old so it’s no surprise that I like yoga. If you were a dancer maybe a barre class is something that may interest you.
You can also connect exercise with something else you love. For example, maybe you really enjoy being out in nature so maybe hiking resonates with you.
Be open to exploring in order to find what suits your needs best and know that what you do for exercise can change, so be open to that as well.
When you find a movement that feels good for your mind, body, and soul it’s much easier to stay consistent and to actually look forward to your workouts. Let’s all add some holistic fitness into our lives!
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