Why do we exercise?

Certainly not to get worse.

We have many different motivations; general health, personal vanity, keeping up with children, gaining strength for a job, looking good for your significant other. No matter the motivation, you are exercising because you believe it will make you better. You do not spend 30 to 90 minutes of your day engaging in an activity to make yourself worse. That would make no sense.

But what if you were? What if you were doing something as part of your exercise that was actually making you worse off. Time is valuable, and no matter if you enjoy working out or not, you certainly would change what you were doing if you thought it was detrimental. Analyze what you are doing currently? Is it helping? Are you losing the weight you planned to lose? Are you moving better than you did several months ago? Are you able to play with the kids? Are you gaining strength?

Because if you are trying to lose weight and you are gaining it then maybe something needs corrected. If you are getting weaker than your routine and diet are out of order and need fixing. And if you are exercising to relieve aches and pains but you are now in more pain than ever, my guess is something needs to change. If you wanted to keep up you’re your grandchildren, but now your knees or hips won’t let you sit on the floor, maybe you need to reevaluate.

I cannot address all of those issues specifically, but I want you to be thinking about your training critically and I will use a personal example to encourage you to do so. I will not go into excessive detail, but I recently found out I have an orthopedic issue which predisposes me to shoulder pain. Before I knew about this predisposition, I had spent many months of workouts emphasizing certain large muscles over smaller ones which are easy to ignore. I would never ignore these muscles with my clients. If only trainers would listen to their own advice.

I had focused all of my energy on building muscle at the expense of moving well. And the orthopedic issue combined with the imbalance in my training, produced a storm of pain in my shoulder. Now I am on the road to recovery and doing physical therapy. I am losing muscle because I am not able to train at anywhere near the intensities I am accustomed to. And I am painfully aware of my mistake, pun intended.

I had forgotten why I exercise. Or at least, I had forgotten that there is a hierarchy. That in order to build muscle, you have to be able to move. Without pain. You would think that would be common sense, but I forgot it.

Remember why you do what you do, and make changes if you are on the wrong path.