No matter how hard we all try to keep things under control, life gets away from us sometimes.
As I discussed yesterday, exercise gives us tools to help manage, overcome and/or endure those periods where it feels like the odds are stacked against us.
But like all tools, when we first pick them up they’re unwieldy and it takes time for us to use them effectively.
It’s an arsenal that needs to be honed and sharpened.
To explore the thoughts above, consider what you’d do in this situation…
It’s 2pm. Your diary is clear until 4pm when you’re having a challenging conversation scheduled with your boss and a colleague. It's about a deal that’s been delayed because you felt the terms were unfair on the client.
You believe you acted with integrity and put the needs of the customer first by suggesting some changes to the agreement. Your colleague believes the client would’ve signed if you’d turned the screw, but now you’ve impacted their bonus.
You know you did the right thing; you don’t need to put a deck together or traipse through emails to build a defence, but your colleague is bullish and hot headed, and you’re concerned your boss will side with them just for making more noise.
Would you go on a walk/run or stay at your desk to prepare?
If you exercise regularly, you are more likely to see the walk/run as a way of diverting your attention away from the immediate problem (the conflict) in order to change your perspective on it.
You know it will allow your subconscious some space to view the situation differently and focus on how strongly you believe you did the right thing…giving you clarity in your approach to the conversation and completely changing the narrative.
If you do not exercise regularly, you may see a walk/run as a waste of time, something that will prevent you from preparing a strategic, convincing and exhaustive defence for every point your colleague could make.
I personally believe the first approach encourages you to entering the conversation authentically and is more likely to result in the best outcomes for you...but it might seem counterintuitive.
This is what I mean when I say the benefits of exercise in combatting stressful situations are learned through experience and trial and error.
You need to learn how you react to exercise to understand how it can help.
To summarise:
If exercise is part of your routine, you know the act can provide a welcome distraction from what is directly in front of you, it can promote creativity and dynamism.
If exercise is not part of your routine, you may feel the act limits time for critical analysis and the development of a structured approach to address what is directly in front of you.
This difference in perspectives is why I’m so passionate about embedding exercise in the lives of children.
Not only does it deliver them increased confidence, peer acceptance, leadership skills and empathy…
Not only does it provide them with better cardiorespiratory fitness, stronger bones and muscles, weight control and a reduced risk of developing health conditions such as heart disease…
It also embeds in them a way of preparing for stressful, scary, worrisome and anxiety inducing situations with clarity, creativity and purpose.
The power of that cannot be underestimated.
Adopting Exercise as an Adult
Everyday adults introduce exercise into their lives and reap enormous rewards. As a fitness coach it is my job to help people achieve that and I have seen so many people make amazing progress as a result.
But without doing myself out of a job…it’s important to acknowledge that we find it difficult to make behavioural change.
Take these New Year’s Resolutions statistics for example…
59% of young adults (18-34) have New Year’s resolutions (which makes it the largest goal-setting demographic)
48% want to exercise more, making it the most popular New Year’s resolution (the top 3 are all health-related)
23% quit in the first week, and only 36% make it past the first month.
9% successfully keep their New Year’s resolutions
They aren’t pretty numbers.
As adults we struggle to adopt new habits…but (though we all know there are plenty of times we wish this wasn’t true) we are very good at doing things we’ve always done.
If We Start Young, We Don’t Stop
A study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine was conducted on the same group of people over 21 years to track ‘Physical Activity from Childhood to Adulthood’ (Source: Science Direct).
Amid the scientific jargon in the summary are three clear statements:
Physical activity at the age of 9 to 18 significantly predicts adult physical activity.
Persistent physical activity at a young age considerably increases the probability of being active in adulthood.
Participation in general in physical activity and sports, and continuous participation at school age in particular, are more important than participation in specific sports.
Put simply:
If you do any persistent physical exercise as a child, there is a huge likelihood you’ll continue to do something in adulthood
That is the key!
Conclusion
Instead of waiting until they’ve got stress at work, relationship problems, poor time management or challenging conversations to have with friends over rent…let children develop the tools that’ll help them later on before they’ve got any perception of what a job even is!
Don’t let them get to the point where they have to choose between ‘real life’ and making time for exercise.
We have an obligation to make sure it is embedded in their routine from as far back as they can remember, so they see movement as a part of life, not something they ‘might’ make room for.
My final blog in this series will look into what, as individuals, we can do to help make this happen. Look out for ‘The Call To Action – What we have to do’
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