My Journey With Health And Fitness – Trying Not To Be Intimidated

Went for a very early morning walk today and saw something awesome. As I was leaving the pier and getting back onto the promenade I saw a teenaged boy, maybe 15 or 16, with a man who was obviously his father because they looked so much alike. Off they went starting to run. They ran together for quite a while then the father told his son he didn’t need to stay behind with him. So then son picked up his pace probably so that he could get a good run in while the dad just carried on at his own pace. It was really nice to see.

Every Friday it is circuit class at the fitness centre. Our normal instructor was on vacation so we had a sub but someone who’s classes I enjoy because they are often brutal. I was a little worried about how tough the circuit class would be and the instructor didn’t disappoint. As always she seems to have a repertoire of what seems to be unique exercises and they are challenging

I often take myself out of my comfort zone and try things that intimidate me. For example, standing on what appears to be a very large elastic band doing pull ups. The first time this was set up in a class I thought, no way. That band looked far to flimsy and unstable and given the fact when I blew out my knee it was by having a significant fall, my head said, don’t even think about it. After a few rounds of exercises I decided to overcome my fear and successfully did those pull ups and have had no problem doing them ever since.

Yesterday it was bar bell snatches. This is where you bend down to pick up the bar bell, keeping close to your body and then ‘snatch’ it over you head. Now don’t get me wrong, I do dumb bell snatches all the time which is the same concept but you do it with a single dumb bell using a single arm. Even that move took me a while to get used to. However, we were given the option of just doing dumb bell snatches so I decided that would be better for me though I acknowledge I used a significant weight.

We got to the 4th and final round of the circuit and I thought, I’m not letting that one exercise intimidate me. So, as I was doing the exercise before the snatches I walked by the instructor and asked if she would coach me a bit on the snatches which she seemed thrilled to do. And so I bent down, picked up the weighted bar bell, pushed through my legs and snatched that sucker over my head. Don’t get me wrong, it was really hard but I conquered it and managed several more snatches in those 45 seconds.

I just can’t let challenges intimidate me. Yes there are things that my cranky knee simply will not let me do like bench step ups but that’s understandable. There is not a single exercise that I thought to be intimidating that I have tried where I wasn’t successful. I find once you do it, going forward it just won’t look that bad.

Moving forward, unless I know it is something the cranky knee will not be able to do, I’m going to give all exercises a try. You know that old saying, you can’t succeed if you don’t try.