Hey there, I hope you’re having a great week so far! I’m writing this blog because I see allot of people talking about exercise for losing weight, building muscles and looking good which are all good reason to exercise, but I would like to suggest changing your focus altogether. I recommend changing your focus to mental health – exercising to stay in a positive mood throughout the day. I’ve been interested in exercise and health for years, being a black belt in karate and having trained with some of the best martial artists from around the world and studied different styles of martial arts including Shotokan, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Wing Chun. I have also been part of the Scottish Karate team and won the Scottish championship title. I also qualified as a REPS gym instructor.
I’m not saying this to brag, simply to give some background to my opinion on this. It’s clear that many people exercise to reach a goal, that could be to lose weight, tone up or build strength and muscle. This does make sense, and exercising is a great way of achieving these goals. My viewpoint has always been that exercise should be part of your life, and not something you do for short term goals. Because of this I believe everyone should exercise with long terms goals in mind and exercising for mental health is a very good long term goal to focus on.
I believe the most important thing for you to do is have a positive mindset, feel great about yourself and be joyful everyday, the result of this type of mindset is far more powerful than allowing a set of scales to determine your happiness. By focusing on exercises for mental health it doesn’t matter if your weight shift up and down, you will feel great because you exercised full stop. We could compare this to watching shares on the stock market, shares are constantly changing, going up and down like a yoyo, successful traders don’t check their stocks every day, they are in it for the long term, this means they could check them on a weekly or even monthly basis. If we compare that to weight loss, if you jump on the scales every Friday night after an Indian takeaway and bottle of wine it’s probably not going to be what you were looking for. This means you’re relying on external things to decide how you should feel about yourself, and if for your weight can have control over your feelings, what will stop everything else from having the same, the type car that you drive and the brand of clothing you wear.
What is universally agreed by successful people is that having a positive mindset itself is a massive contributor to your own success, can you imagine if every decision you made and every challenge you face is tackled with a negative mindset, it’s likely not going to result in the best outcome. People are attracted to positive people, so if you want great things in your life, you have to start working on your mindset.
Exercising for mood means including a ritual to your routine, I always start my exercising with a 5 minute fun exercise, I slowly build up the intensity over the 5 minutes. This takes off any pressure, and gives me the opportunity to gauge how my body is performing on that day, if my body feels roaring to go then i know to push myself harder that day, and if my body is not feeling so great I will back off on the intensity and exercise for a bit longer at a less intense pace.
After a 5 minute warm up, I will have a stretch using yoga techniques. I will do this for 5 minutes and it will allow me to stretch out my entire body in preparation for the next part of the exercise. I focus more on the parts of my body which I will be using in the exercise, so for example if I’m doing the spin bike I will focus on my legs, hips and lower back more than my arms.
The exercise itself will vary depending on how my body felt in the warm up, I will usually either do 20 minutes HIIT session – which usually consists of 60 second bursts with 60 seconds rest, or I will keep a good pace for the full 30 minutes. The correct way of doing this would be to steadily increase the pace for the first 10 minutes, maintain a good pace for a further 10 and then slowly reduce the pace for the final 10 minutes. This is something I would repeat around 3 times a week. My focus is to improve my mindset and overall health and not on losing weight. I also focus on increasing my VO2 Max.
Following a final warm down I meditate for 10 minutes using Head space to get my mind right for the rest of the day ahead. I don’t measure weight, fat proportions or anything else physical, only how consistent I have been with the training and how I feel as a result of it.
If you can adapt your exercise routine to focus on your long terms goals, for example ‘I want to live longer and healthier’, you wont be as reactive based on short term measurements and so it will be more likely you will stick with it and you will have a more positive mood as a result.
I want to hear if you found this interesting, so please let me know in the comments. Good luck!
