“Stay active!” “Get up and move for at least 30 minutes a day” “Working out is fun!”
If these phrases just make you roll your eyes and go in one ear and out the other, I completely get it. I used to be right there with you, sitting there thinking “been there, done that” to all of these kinds of suggestions. Throughout my childhood I tried just about everything—I had been on the softball and swim teams, I had tried gymnastics and martial arts, I even biked or walked to and from school everyday in an effort to “stay active” as much as I could. Despite the range of activities I attempted, I could never seem to find anything that motivated me to keep going. Every time I had to get ready for one of these activities I would feel so much dread and be completely apathetic to the point that I wouldn’t try my best. This just lead to a never-ending cycle of feeling inadequate in that specific sport and then having even less motivation. By the end of my sophomore year of high school I decided that I just wasn’t a sport person and that advice like the kind I started this article with wasn’t realistic for me.
This all changed the following year when I took my first yoga class. Now, I won’t try and sell you the idea that once you find a form of exercise that works for you you’ll know right away like some miracle sent down from the skies. Originally, I was actually really opposed to the idea of trying out yoga; it just didn’t seem like the type of exercise I would be interested in in the long run. Much to my surprise, after the first couple sessions I found myself not dreading—even looking forward to—my yoga classes. Even though I wasn’t amazing at it right away, I could feel the progress I was making and that alone was enough to keep me going to class after class. I slowly learned to focus on this feeling of progress, even during the days I felt out of sync and didn’t have the best practice.
Fast forward to my freshman year of college, I walked into my first Fitlife class here on campus. I was excited but nervous—I had never done kickboxing before and now there I was in a class during my first quarter in college. I wanted to get more active now that I was away from home, but I was completely daunted by the gym so that wasn’t really an option for me at that moment. I decided to stick to the small-group classes offered by OPERS and see if any of them clicked for me the way yoga had a few years prior. Unfortunately for me, I noticed that I was beginning to dread going all the way down the hill to OPERS pretty quickly. It was just so tedious to me that for an hour-long exercise class I had to block out around three hours of my day to eat, get ready, go down there and shower afterwards. As the quarter progressed and I started getting involved in other things, I started making more and more excuses to not go. The next quarter I signed up again, but soon after I started making excuses again. This cycle continued throughout the next year and a half, right up until COVID hit.
I got an email saying that Fitlife classes were now going to be offered virtually, through zoom and pre-recorded classes that were available on the OPERS website. I quickly decided that my new quarantine hobby was going to be working out at home with the help of these classes, but unfortunately I fell back on my usual habits and got swept up by the remainder of spring quarter classes, forgetting all about my resolution. That is, until I moved back to campus this past fall. Now living in an apartment on campus with a lot more room and flexibility to work out in, I started to work out more and more consistently with these Fitlife classes I signed up for. I really started enjoying the flexibility I now had in terms of these classes, since now when signing up for a class it wasn’t for a whole quarter like it was when the classes were offered in person. Virtual Fitlife classes now had daily/weekly signups, allowing me to customize what I could realistically fit in my schedule for that week, and best of all, the classes were now free!
Now a year later, I am kicking off this spring quarter having not only the motivation to keep going to these classes, but also the discipline I have learned throughout my struggles of finding what worked for me. I still attend my weekly cardio kickboxing classes, along with some others, and I feel a lot more accomplished at the end of each session than I could have ever expected to be just a few months prior. I use the skill of focusing on the progress I make, however small, to motivate myself to continue. Even on the days that I’m feeling especially sluggish, I treat my workout times as any other class or responsibility I have to do, and I end up feeling refreshed by the end of the session. This doesn’t mean I beat myself up if I don’t end up going to a class, though. It’s important to have the discipline to help you push through the hard times, but also equally important to remind yourself that one missed workout or “cheat” meal won’t make or break the progress you have achieved.
I am so incredibly glad that I was stubborn enough to keep looking for the right thing for me, even after all the times I gave up. If you feel like you’re in a similar situation, I have two main tips for you: keep trying new things and find something to hold onto when creating a balance between discipline and flexibility. Just because something worked out for you in the past, doesn’t mean it will right now and that’s okay! We are constantly changing and in order for us to continue to work towards our goals it might be necessary to go out of our comfort zone once in a while. Focus on the little things you enjoy about a certain activity and it might help you succeed in the long run.