Don't Pink Slip Your Workout

by Heather Long | More from this Blogger

05 May 2006 04:57 PM

I can't go out walking today, it's raining. I can't hit the treadmill today; I have a ton of work to do. I can't get my strength training in; I need to get all these errands run. I can't do my yoga because the kids are racing around the house. The truth of the matter is that there's always a good reason to give our workout a pink slip and there's an even better one to not.

Your body is programmed to handle stress on the muscles. It is programmed to repair muscle damage and strains, to toughen up and to burn off the calories. You were programmed to handle all of this from the day you were born. It's in your DNA.

While it's true that activity, any activity that gets you moving is a good thing, it's also true that exercise is cumulative. Let me give you an example. You want to save some money for your vacation in six months. You decide you are going to put away five dollars a day.

That's about $25 a week. For most of us, that's pretty doable. At the end of six months, you'd have about six to seven hundred in the bank. Not a bad sum for your vacation, maybe not enough for a week at a spa, but definitely enough to take a week off and do something. But the only way to get to that is to accumulate the money in your account.

Every day that you find an excuse to not put in that $5 is a day that you trim away from your goal total - so let's say the first couple of weeks, you do your $5 a day with no problems. But in week 3, you decide you really needed to pick up a pair of shoes so you just use two or three days worth of money there - you've accumulated about $50 towards your total, but you just took about $15 away from it.

It's called nickel and dimeing yourself and what happens after a few more incidences is that you get to the six-month mark; you find that you only have about $300 in the bank instead of the $600 you were planning for. You will be frustrated and you will think what was the point of saving that money if it didn't do you any good in the long run.

This is why we shouldn't pink slip our workouts unless we have a real need or a real reason. Because our exercise is cumulative - it requires each part of the plan to accumulate to the end result. If you can only commit to two days a week, then do two days a week. If you commit to three then do three. But don't commit to five days, only do two days and expect to get a five-day result in the end.

That's how we end up leaving ourselves frustrated and quitting working out altogether because we've told ourselves one thing and done another. So don't pink slip your workout - because the one who ends up with the pink slip in the long run is you.

Learn more about Heather Long

Heather Long is 35 years old and currently lives in Wylie, Texas. She has been a freelance writer for six years. Her husband and she met while working together at America Online over ten years ago.

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